Disturbing The Universepowerandrepressioninliterature

D is t ur bi ng
the universe
Disturbing
the Universe
power and repression in
adolescent literature
by Roberta Seelinger Trites
u n i v e r s i t y o f i o wa p r e s s Iowa City
University of Iowa Press, Iowa City 52242
Copyright 䉷 2000 by the University of Iowa Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Design by Richard Hendel
http://www.uiowa.edu/⬃uipress
No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any
form or by any means, without permission in writing
from the publisher. All reasonable steps have been taken
to contact copyright holders of material used in this
book. The publisher would be pleased to make suitable
arrangements with any whom it has not been possible to
reach.
Portions of chapter 4 first appeared as ‘‘Queer Discourse
and the Young Adult Novel: Repression and Power in Gay
Male Adolescent Literature,’’ Children’s Literature Quarterly
23 (1998): 143–151. Reprinted with permission of the
Children’s Literature Association.
Portions of chapter 5 first appeared as ‘‘Narrative
Resolution: Photography in Adolescent Literature,’’
Children’s Literature, 27. New Haven: Yale UP, 1999. 129–
149. Reprinted with permission of Yale University Press.
The publication of this book was generously supported by

the University of Iowa Foundation.
Printed on acid-free paper
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Trites, Roberta Seelinger, 1962–
Disturbing the universe: power and repression in
adolescent literature / by Roberta Seelinger Trites.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 0-87745-732-8 (cloth)
1. Young adult fiction, American—History and
criticism. 2. Adolescence in literature.
3. Postmodernism (Literature)—United States. 4. Power
(Social sciences) in literature. 5. Repression (Psychology)
in literature. 6. Teenagers—Books and reading. I. Title.
ps374.a3t75 2000
813.009⬘9283— dc21
00-037422
00 01 02 03 04 c 5 4 3 2 1
For George Major, with love
Contents
Preface, ix
Chapter 1
‘‘Do I dare disturb the universe?’’
Adolescent Literature in the Postmodern Era, 1
Chapter 2
‘‘I don’t know the words’’
Institutional Discourses in Adolescent Literature, 21
Chapter 3
‘‘Maybe that is writing, changing things around and disguising the for-real’’
The Paradox of Authority in Adolescent Literature, 54
Chapter 4
‘‘All of a sudden I came’’
Sex and Power in Adolescent Novels, 84
Chapter 5
‘‘When I can control the focus’’
Death and Narrative Resolution in Adolescent Literature, 117
Chapter 6
Conclusion
The Poststructural Pedagogy of Adolescent Literature, 142
Notes, 153
Bibliography, 163
Index, 177
Preface
remember complaining to a friend in 1975 that I was tired
I of reading the books in our middle school library because

‘‘they’re all about kids with problems.’’ Maybe with that
succinct analysis of the 1970s problem novel, I damned my-
self to a lifetime of studying adolescent literature. In any event,
trying to understand the genre as a whole was certainly part of my
motivation for taking a college course on the subject in 1980. The
teacher, Dorothy Van Riper, commented at the time on the inade-
quacy of critical materials in the field. Another professor, Lilian R.
Furst, mentioned the same problem in a graduate seminar I had
in 1984 (a seminar in which I was regarded as the resident field
expert, having only recovered from adolescence the week before
the course started). By the time I was safely past adolescence in
1992, a senior colleague of mine—Taimi Ranta—raised the same
concern about the dearth of criticism in the field. Since I have
been thinking about these issues so long, it seems fair to say that
this book has been twenty-five years in the making.
I did not reach any real breakthrough in understanding the
genre, however, until I began teaching the course myself in 1994.
From my own studies, I had expected to find many rites of pas-
sage and initiations, patterns of growth, conflicts, Oedipal crises,
confessional first-person narrators, and identity crises. But as I
taught the course, I began noticing other recurring patterns in
these books, some of which seemed predictable and others that
did not. Books for adolescents are subversive—but sometimes
only superficially so. In fact, they are often quite didactic; the de-
nouements of many Young Adult novels contain a direct message
about what the narrator has learned. Moreover, books for adoles-
cents have lots of sex. And many dreadful parents. Many photog-
raphers. Many schools. Many dead bodies. (In a course that in-
x : Preface
cluded Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Outsiders, The Chocolate

War, Toning the Sweep, and The Pigman, one class counted more than
fifteen deaths in the first five weeks of the semester.) Books for
adolescents have many ideologies. And they spend much time ma-
nipulating the adolescent reader.
Eventually, I realized that these lists of predictable and unpre-
dictable patterns in adolescent literature share one thing. They can
all be linked to issues of power. Although the primary purpose of
the adolescent novel may appear to be a depiction of growth,
growth in this genre is inevitably represented as being linked to
what the adolescent has learned about power. Without experienc-
ing gradations between power and powerlessness, the adolescent
cannot grow. Thus, power is even more fundamental to adoles-
cent literature than growth. During adolescence, adolescents must
learn their place in the power structure. They must learn to nego-
tiate the many institutions that shape them: school, government,
religion, identity politics, family, and so on. They must learn to
balance their power with their parents’ power and with the power
of the other authority figures in their lives. And they must learn
what portion of power they wield because of and despite such
biological imperatives as sex and death. Foucault tells us it is in
the very nature of power to be both enabling and repressive be-
cause it is omnipresent: ‘‘power is everywhere; not because it
embraces everything but because it comes from everywhere’’
(History 93). His words can be modified to fit books about adoles-
cence: in adolescent literature, power is everywhere.
Yet somehow, the critical study of adolescent literature has de-
veloped as a field without any great reliance on some of the post-
structural theories that best help explicate the issues of power in
the books that teenagers read. Caroline Hunt offers one explana-
tion why this has happened. She suspects that because many of
the critics who teach college courses on adolescent literature are
often training teachers, professors tend to focus on topics that
are commonly accepted as pertinent to pre-service teachers, such
as issues of censorship or identifying the literary elements of a
novel (11). But if we engage the poststructural theories that help
us to understand the transactions between text, reader, and cul-
ture, we can become more astute readers, teachers, and critics.
Preface : xi
Theories that invite us to be sensitive to language and how it

constructs the individual, theories that raise our awareness about
race and class and gender and adolescence itself as social con-
structs, theories that demonstrate the relationship between narra-
tive structures and ideologies, and theories that help us to position
the reader can work together to help us discern how the elements
of adolescent literature establish intricate patterns that reinforce
the contradictory positions of adolescents within our culture.
Indeed, adolescents occupy an uncomfortable liminal space in
America. Adolescents are both powerful (in the youthful looks
and physical prowess that are glorified by Hollywood and Madi-
son Avenue; in the increased economic power of middle-class
American teenagers as consumers; in the typical scenario of teen-
agers succeeding in their rebellions against authority figures) and
disempowered (in the increased objectification of the teenage
body that leads many adolescents to perpetrate acts of violence
against the Self or Other; in the decreased economic usefulness
of the teenager as a producer of goods in postindustrial America;
in the typical scenario of teenagers rebelling against authority fig-
ures to escape oppression). It is no wonder that the body of litera-
ture linked to this population pursues the exploration of power
relentlessly.
The opening chapter of this study, then, includes a study of
some of the pivotal issues that have historically informed adoles-
cent literature, the first of which is the nature of power. I next
investigate definitions of ‘‘adolescent literature,’’ including a focus
on the Young Adult novel (that is, the novel specifically marketed
to an adolescent audience) as a subset of the broader genre about
adolescents, adolescent literature. Finally, I trace the historical
study of the Bildungsroman as a way to contextualize the develop-
ment of the ya novel as a postmodern phenomenon. My goal in
this chapter is to provide the reader with a sense of the literary
patterns and the history of ideas that have led to the existence of
Young Adult literature.
In the second chapter, I explore only four of the many institu-
tions that demonstrate how central power is to the adolescent ex-
perience in novels: politics, school, religion, and identity politics
(including race, class, and gender). In books—as in life—institu-
xii : Preface
tions both empower and repress adolescents in the ways that they
create new opportunities for teenagers while they simultaneously
establish rules within which the teenager must operate. For ex-
ample, government politics and the politics of identity are forces
that shape adolescents in ya novels. As teenagers learn more
about themselves politically, they can often understand them-
selves better—and paradoxically, they express themselves less
freely. Schools and organized religion are also institutions that
work actively to mold the adolescent into appropriate degrees of
power within a culture. Virtually every ya novel depicts the ado-
lescent in conflict with at least one of these types of institutions.
Innumerable institutions that regulate power exist in adolescent
literature, but because they are infinite in number, I leave it to the
reader to further identify them.
Chapter 3 traces how power struggles that exist between indi-
viduals and institutions give rise to multiple conflicts between
adolescents and authority, another arena of the literature with in-
finite possibilities. Two types of authority are especially pertinent
to ya novels: authority within the text and the authority of the
author over the reader. Within the text, authority is often depicted
as a struggle with a parent or a parent substitute, so I rely on
psychoanalytic theory to trace the inevitability of this particular
conflict in adolescent literature. This conflict with authority that
is embedded in most texts for adolescents in turn provides the
author with opportunities for using ideology to manipulate the
adolescent reader. In that sense, authors themselves become au-
thority figures in adolescent literature. The mechanisms by which
they manipulate the reader to assume subject positions that are
carefully constructed to perpetuate the status quo bear investiga-
tion. And because of this, ya novels themselves serve as yet an-
other institution created for the purpose of simultaneously em-
powering and repressing adolescents.
Chapters 4 and 5 explore how sex and death, as biological im-
peratives, both empower and repress in adolescent literature. Such
social constructions as heterosexuality, homosexuality, and lesbi-
anism give rise to depictions of sexuality that explore its ideologi-
cal and discursive nature. Similarly, death has a great discursive
presence in adolescent literature. Death serves as a particularly
Preface : xiii
intricate example of how power is deployed in ya novels because

it has a thematic function and a narrative function for the adoles-
cent reader; that is, the adolescent’s increased understanding of
life as limited by death is a predominant theme in the literature,
but this theme also affects the narrative line of many novels for
teenagers. Thus, death affects the form as well as the function of
many novels marketed to teenagers.
My conclusion is an appeal for the inclusion of poststructural
methodologies in classrooms that employ adolescent literature.
Because ya literature has been so influenced by postmodernism,
the genre lends itself well to poststructural methodologies, al-
though many teachers have been thus far reluctant to employ
these reading strategies in the classroom. Relying on what has
worked in my own teaching, I provide an overview of how schol-
ars of adolescent literature have successfully employed reader
response theory, historicism, multiculturalism, feminism, Bakh-
tinian readings, psychoanalytic theory, Marxism, and narrative
theory. Far from being a complete survey of the field, this chapter
is intended to demonstrate how these theories can be used in the
classroom rather than serving as an exhaustive review of the
literature.
The novels I have included in this study are also very much
influenced by those I have taught in my own classroom. I rely on
several books that I think work well to demonstrate the patterns
in adolescent literature: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Little Women,
The Catcher in the Rye, A Separate Peace, The Outsiders, A Wizard of
Earthsea, The Chocolate War, Is That You, Miss Blue?, Breaktime, Lyddie,
Toning the Sweep, and Weetzie Bat. James Bennett, Francesca Lia
Block, Judy Blume, Bruce Brooks, Aidan Chambers, Robert Cor-
mier, Chris Crutcher, Peter Dickinson, Lois Duncan, Nancy
Garden, Virginia Hamilton, S. E. Hinton, M. E. Kerr, Norma
Klein, Ursula K. Le Guin, Madeleine L’Engle, Margaret Mahy,
Robin McKinley, Walter Dean Myers, Richard Peck, Daniel Pink-
water, William Sleator, Beatrice Sparks, Mildred Taylor, Cynthia
Voigt, Barbara Wersba, Jacqueline Woodson, Laurence Yep, and
Paul Zindel are among the many authors writing in English who
have created texts that are in one way or another pivotal in the
Anglo-American ya canon. Some of these authors are either
xiv : Preface
unrepresented or underrepresented in this text because of space

considerations. Nevertheless, all of them depict adolescents dis-
turbing and being disturbed by the institutions that construct their
universe.
I am blessed in the number of people who have supported the

writing of this book. Certainly it would not exist were it not for the
initial encouragement of two of them: Pamela Riney-Kehrberg,
who urged me to write the sabbatical proposal that became the
foundation of Disturbing the Universe, and Holly Carver of the Uni-
versity of Iowa Press, whose confidence in me made both Waking
Sleeping Beauty and this book possible. Equally supportive were the
staff of the College of Arts and Sciences at Illinois State Univer-
sity. They listened to me, protected my time, and did so much of
my work while I was writing that it feels as if this book were the
result of the entire team headed by Dean Paul Schollaert and in-
cluding Richard Dammers, Peggy Haycraft, Sandi Krumtinger,
and Judy Marshall. I thank them all with unstinted gratitude.
Numerous scholars have provided me with invaluable feed-
back, but I am especially grateful to the readers of the earliest
drafts of the manuscript who were all most generous in shar-
ing their comments with me: Mike Cadden, Karen Coats, Sherri
Inness, Jill May, and Anita Tarr. Nancy Tolson, Anne Phillips,
Bonnie Shaker, Peter Hunt, Betty Greenway, Joel Chaston, Linda
Benson, Phyllis Bixler, Mark West, Caroline Hunt, Michelle Mar-
tin, Vanessa Wayne Lee, Kara Keeling, Maria Nikolajeva, Eliza-
beth Keyser, Lois Kuznets, Kenneth Kidd, Rebecca Saunders,
David Rudd, Marilynn Olson, Gillian Adams, Claudia Nelson,
Jean Stringam, Naomi Wood, Betsy Ford, Ginny Carroll, Laura
Davis-Clapper, Phil Nel, Bob Broad, Teresa Higus, Steve Meck-
stroth, Denise Anton Wright, Pam Day, and Christie Lau all pro-
vided pivotal feedback at key stages of the manuscript’s devel-
opment. Ron Fortune, Betty Chapman, Rodger Tarr, Jan Neuleib,
and Al Feltner have also been consistently supportive.
Because Disturbing the Universe originated from my teaching of
English 375, Adolescent Literature, at Illinois State University, I
would be remiss not to mention at least a fraction of the students
who influenced my thinking about adolescent literature over the
years, including Jenny Abraham, Tim Ballard, Deborah Brothers,
Preface : xv
Molly Burdette, Ronn Byrd, Julie Fraser, Heidi Green, Joellen

Handling, Sundown Handt, Cortez Harris, Amy Hutchinson,
Candy Jendro, Caroline Jones, Melissa Juvinall, Karla Kelly, Greg
Maier, Lori Marable, Mike Martin, Ryan McCrae, Amanda Mc-
Menamin, Aamon Miller, Kathy Moore, Wanda Myers, Michelle
Ochs, Val Perry, Kim Plattner, Lesley Powers, Temecka Russell,
Dana Scott, Julie Semlak, LeKeya Sherrill, Leslie Shobe, Shawn
Staley, Becky Thomason, Laurie Walczak, Owen Williams, and
Dan Zehr. I regret that I cannot name all of the more than two
hundred students who deserve to be listed here.
The friends who served as midwives to this project were Susan
Burt, Lisa Choate, Cindy Christiansen, Elizabeth Davis, Margaret
Haefner, Laura Pedrick, Pam Riney-Kehrberg, and Pat Witzig.
They supplied me with the caffeine, the e-mails, the good reading,
the advice, and the laughter I needed to get through the labor of
writing a book and balancing the rest of my life. Just as important
were the sanity-saving friends who allowed me to sing with them:
Sally Parry, Bob McLaughlin, Rick Martin, Tak Cheung, Tony
Otsuka, Mary Williams, John Hatle, and all the members of the
Music Club.
But my deepest thanks go to the person who never complains
about my writing or my singing: my husband, George Seelinger.
Without him, most of what I value in this life would not be
possible.
D is t ur bi ng
the universe
chapter 1
‘‘Do I dare disturb the universe?’’

adolescent literature in
the postmodern era
And indeed there will be time

To wonder, ‘‘Do I dare?’’ and, ‘‘Do I dare?’’
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair —
(They will say: ‘‘How his hair is growing thin!’’)
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin —
(They will say: ‘‘But how his arms and legs are thin!’’)
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
(excerpt from ‘‘The Love Song of
J. Alfred Prufrock,’’ by T. S. Eliot)
. S. Eliot was in his early twenties and undoubtedly
T still feeling the diverse effects of adolescence when he

published ‘‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,’’ his
poem about a Hamlet-like middle-aged man who is
immobilized by indecision. At its core, the poem asks a question
as germane to adolescents as it is to the middle-aged: ‘‘Do I dare
disturb the universe?’’ Given that many teenagers wonder if they
should or even can affect the world in which they live, Eliot has
captured the essence of adolescence when he has his narrator pose
the question.1 In the context of adolescence, Prufrock’s question
reflects the desire that many teenagers have to test the degree of
power they hold. Because at its heart this question ‘‘Do I dare
disturb the universe?’’ is about power, it serves as an apt metaphor
for what adolescents often seek to know about themselves.
Jerry Renault takes up this question in Robert Cormier’s The
Chocolate War (1974). Jerry hangs in his school locker a poster of a
man walking alone on a beach that bears the caption ‘‘Do I dare
disturb the universe?’’: ‘‘Jerry wasn’t sure of the poster’s meaning.
But it had moved him mysteriously’’ (97). The Chocolate War
2 : The Postmodern Era
explores the question of whether Jerry can disturb the universe

— of what will happen to him if he dares to assert his personal
power. Jerry is a student at Trinity High School, a Catholic boys’
school that is involved in a fund-raising candy sale. The acting
principal, Brother Leon, invites the school’s unrecognized but
powerful vigilante fraternity, The Vigils, to participate in the sale,
which they agree to do in an effort to increase their power over
other students. The Vigils have a tradition of meting out ‘‘assign-
ments’’ to haze students: Jerry Renault’s first assignment is to
resist Brother Leon’s efforts to make him sell the chocolates
for ten days. Jerry accepts the assignment but then disturbs the
universe of Trinity High School when he continues refusing to
sell the chocolates past the ten days of his assignment, even af-
ter The Vigils have ordered him to begin selling the candies
again. He is the first student ever to resist The Vigils. In a final
showdown, Archie, the leader of The Vigils, and his sidekick
Obie manipulate a boxing match in which Jerry is ritualistically
slaughtered.
Jerry’s final words in the novel echo the novel’s opening state-
ment, ‘‘They murdered him.’’ His final lines are unspoken thoughts
that he directs to his friend Goober: ‘‘Do whatever they wanted
you to do. . . . They tell you to do your own thing but they don’t
mean it. They don’t want you to do your thing, not unless it hap-
pens to be their thing, too. . . . Don’t disturb the universe, Goober,
no matter what the posters say. . . . Otherwise, they murder you’’
(187). Although Jerry appears defeated and is even possibly dead
by novel’s end, the book still answers the question affirmatively:
yes, he can disturb the universe. In fact, he should disturb the uni-
verse. Doing so may be painful, but Jerry has affected other
people with the choices he has made.
This intertextual question that lies at the heart of The Chocolate
War — ‘‘Do I dare disturb the universe?’’ — is representative of
an ethos that informs many adolescent novels. The chief charac-
teristic that distinguishes adolescent literature from children’s lit-
erature is the issue of how social power is deployed during the
course of the narrative. In books that younger children read, such
as Peter Rabbit, Where the Wild Things Are, Alice in Wonderland, Winnie-
the-Pooh, Charlotte’s Web, Zeely, or Sarah, Plain and Tall, much of the
action focuses on one child who learns to feel more secure in the
The Postmodern Era : 3
confines of her or his immediate environment, usually represented

by family and home.2 Children’s literature often affirms the child’s
sense of Self and her or his personal power.
But in the adolescent novel, protagonists must learn about the
social forces that have made them what they are. They learn to
negotiate the levels of power that exist in the myriad social insti-
tutions within which they must function, including family; school;
the church; government; social constructions of sexuality, gen-
der, race, class; and cultural mores surrounding death. One critic
of adolescent literature, Perry Nodelman, dismissively describes
characters in adolescent fiction as people who ‘‘live ordinary lives,
but see them in terms of melodrama’’ (‘‘Robert Cormier’’ 102).
Nodelman is undoubtedly reacting to the profound seriousness
that many of these characters express in their first confusion about
social institutions. In The Chocolate War, for example, Jerry Renault
must negotiate his place within a family, in terms of a religion, and
in his school. Jerry’s epiphany is a recognition that social institu-
tions are bigger and more powerful than individuals. The lesson
he learns is a primary one in Young Adult literature.
Young Adult novels are about power. But they have not devel-
oped this tendency from within a vacuum. Thus, in this chapter I
will explore four topics: power as it is defined in ways germane to
adolescence; definitions of adolescent literature and the ya novel
in the context of their historical evolutions; an investigation into
the genres that have influenced the development of the ya novel,
notably the novel of development and the coming-of-age novel;
and the influence of such literary movements as romanticism and
postmodernism on the depiction of adolescence in Young Adult
novels. It is my contention that we can better understand the dy-
namic relationship in literature between characters and the insti-
tutions that define them if we also understand the history of ideas
that affected the unique development of the Young Adult novel.
Power
Before I go any further, I want to explore the concept of

‘‘power,’’ both as I am using it and as others have used it, in ways
that are pertinent to the study of adolescent literature. Max Weber
defines power as ‘‘the possibility of imposing one’s will upon the

behavior of other persons [which] can emerge in the most di-
verse forms’’ (323). Weber focuses on economic power as the in-
stitutional power that dominates most people (323–324). Althus-
ser broadens the definition of economic power, demonstrating
how as Ideological State Apparatuses, institutions have a self-
perpetuating interest in instilling their ideologies into the masses
in order to retain their hegemony (155–157). Michel Foucault de-
fines power as ‘‘that which represses’’ (Power 90), and he identi-
fies power as ubiquitous: ‘‘Power is everywhere; not because it
embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere’’
(History 93).3 Foucault contrasts two political definitions of insti-
tutional power. One he calls the ‘‘contract-oppression schema’’
(Power 92). It is based on the belief that all individuals hold a cer-
tain amount of power that they voluntarily relinquish to exist un-
der the rule of a governing body (88). The other he calls the
‘‘domination-repression’’ model, in which the individual exists in
‘‘a perpetual relationship of force’’ (92). The latter of these views,
and the one Foucault considers a more plausible explanation of
social dynamics, defines power as a political force that is a func-
tion of the economy — of the forces of production — and so is
in perpetual motion. Individuals do not possess power so much
as they apply it in the process of trading market goods (98), so
power ‘‘only exists in action’’ (89). Power is more a process than a
commodity, according to him.4 As a result, market forces repress
the individual’s power rather than individuals’ power being op-
pressed by a sovereign.
If we believed the contract-oppression definition of power
that Foucault rejects, we might say that in The Chocolate War Jerry
Renault has power in agreeing to exist in harmony with the forces
of oppression at Trinity High School, The Vigils and the teachers.
He is defeated by novel’s end because he has chosen to break
the contract and so must be oppressed by the power structure.
Foucault would say instead that rather than possessing a certain
amount of power to begin with, Jerry actually exists in a chain
of power, a chain that involves the selling of education as a com-
modity and that results in the commodification of the chocolates.
Their sale is a means of production for the students. Jerry’s power
in the situation is fluid: he both has and does not have power, de-
pending on his relationship to the market forces at specific points

in the novel’s time. When he overwhelms the market by providing
a model for the other boys’ nonparticipation in the means of pro-
duction, the market retaliates by attempting to obliterate him in a
‘‘war.’’ Foucault even supplies the term ‘‘war-repression schema’’
as a synonym for the ‘‘domination-repression’’ model of power;
he makes much of the notion that ‘‘power is war, a war continued
by other means’’ (Power 90). I think Foucault would enjoy Cor-
mier’s bellicose choice for a title, The Chocolate War.
Problems exist, however, with both Foucault’s model of power
and the one he rejects, in that neither allows for the individual’s
potentially positive power. Whether we think of people as op-
pressed by the state or by dynamic economic forces, we are focus-
ing on power as something that conspires against them. An alter-
nate way of thinking of power is in terms of subjectivity, in terms
of the individual’s occupation of the linguistic subject position. In
The Psychic Life of Power Judith Butler promulgates such a definition
of power in acknowledging that the individual ‘‘is at once formed
and subordinated’’ (6) by power because ‘‘power not only acts on a
subject but, in a transitive sense, enacts the subject into being’’ (13).
As such, power is the force that allows for subjectivity and con-
sequently, agency.5 Moreover, power exists both externally and as
the very source that constitutes the subject (15). Butler thus con-
curs with Foucault’s analysis that power is a process, but her defi-
nition allows for an internally motivated subject who can act
proactively rather than solely in terms of taking action to prevent
oppression or repression. Butler might focus on the decision Jerry
Renault makes when he utters the word ‘‘no,’’ refusing to sell the
chocolates (Cormier, Chocolate War 89). His action is a linguistic
utterance and a conscious choice, and the textual commentary
on his action is telling: ‘‘Cities fell. Earth opened. Planets tilted.
Stars plummeted. And the awful silence’’ (89). Language here is a
marker of power, especially because Jerry’s loss of language rep-
resents a dramatic shift in the power structure at his school.
Lacan supplies another pertinent definition of power. Focusing
like Butler on the interior formation of the subject and like Fou-
cault on the exterior forces that repress the subject, Lacan de-
scribes individual power in terms of assomption: the individual’s ac-
tive assumption of responsibility for the role into which society
casts her or him (Fink 46– 48). As Lacan puts it, ‘‘one is always
responsible for one’s position as subject’’ (‘‘Science and Truth’’ 7;
quoted in Fink 47). Such a definition of power acknowledges both
the external and internal forces that compete to empower and re-
press individual power, but it also allows for the individual’s ac-
knowledgment of one’s power as a necessary function of subjec-
tivity. When adolescents grapple with such questions as, ‘‘Do I
dare disturb the universe?’’ they must reckon with both their sense
of individual power and their recognition of the social forces that
require them to modify their behaviors.
Lacan’s thinking about power influences Karen Coats when she
interprets The Chocolate War. She does so in terms of assomption,
pointing out that Jerry Renault is an example of a person who
assumes the position of Other into which he has been forced.6 He
starts out forced into a position that is painful, but then finds the
pleasure in the situation by willfully accepting the enforced posi-
tion. He has taken responsibility for the pain but also for the plea-
sure that he gets from the pain in being subjugated. Even as he is
being annihilated by those who oppose him, he is victorious be-
cause he has done what he set out to do. He has assumed respon-
sibility for the role of rebel into which the society of Trinity High
School has cast him.
Feminist theorists such as Marilyn French also talk about
power in terms of being enabled. French prefers a model in which
people have ‘‘power to’’ do good rather than having ‘‘power over’’
other people to dominate them. She writes, ‘‘There is power-to,
which refers to ability, capacity, and connotes a kind of freedom,
and there is power-over, which refers to domination’’ (505). To a
certain extent, I am interested in how adolescents are empowered
(and disempowered) in terms that French uses: when are teenag-
ers in Young Adult literature allowed to assume responsibility for
their own actions and when do dominating adults refuse to ac-
knowledge their capabilities? But the larger question for me is an
investigation of the fluid ways that the individual negotiates with
her or his society, with the ways adolescents’ power is simultane-
ously acknowledged and denied, engaged and disengaged. As John
Knowles writes in A Separate Peace (1959), ‘‘ When you are sixteen,
adults are slightly impressed and almost intimidated by you’’ (31).
What, then, do adolescents do with that intimidating power?
The various definitions of power I have described work to-

gether to form a definition of power in adolescent literature.
Adolescent characters exist in a ‘‘perpetual relationship of force’’
(Foucault, Power 92) created by the institutions that constitute the
social fabric constructing them. Because they are defined within
perpetual forces of power, power ‘‘enacts [them] into being’’ (But-
ler, Psychic 13). That is, the social power that constructs them be-
stows upon them a power from which they generate their own
sense of subjectivity. As acting subjects, they assume responsi-
bility for their position in society (Lacan, ‘‘Science and Truth’’ 7),
whether they engage their power to enable themselves or to re-
press others (French 505). Power is a force that operates within
the subject and upon the subject in adolescent literature; teenagers
are repressed as well as liberated by their own power and by the
power of the social forces that surround them in these books.
Much of the genre is thus dedicated to depicting how potentially
out-of-control adolescents can learn to exist within institutional
structures.
Defining and Historicizing the Genre
In trying to define adolescent literature, Sheila Schwartz notes

that the American Library Association classifies adolescent litera-
ture into three categories: ‘‘Books Written Specifically for Adoles-
cents,’’ ‘‘Books Written for General Trade Market Which Have
Adolescent Heroes and Heroines,’’ and ‘‘General Books of Inter-
est to Young Adults’’ (3). Elsewhere, I have referred to the first of
these three categories as Young Adult novels, whereas I consider
the three lists combined to constitute the whole of adolescent lit-
erature (‘‘Theories’’ 2–3). Maria Nikolajeva observes that in many
European countries, Young Adult novels are referred to as ‘‘jeans
prose’’ because of their emphasis on such artifacts of material
culture as ‘‘clothes, food, music, language’’ (62). ya novels are
certainly a marketplace phenomenon of the twentieth century.7
Adults create these books as a cultural site in which adolescents
can be depicted engaging with the fluid, market-driven forces that
characterize the power relationships that define adolescence. Af-
ter all, publishers rather than teenagers bestow the designation
‘‘ya’’ on these books. Even when authors have not intentionally

written for adolescents, they invariably portray adolescents en-
gaged in a domination-repression model, so authors, too, are
complicitous in the process. Cormier, for example, maintains that
he did not write The Chocolate War for an adolescent audience
(Cormier quoted in DeLuca and Natov 110 –111). But a trend has
emerged in the way ya novels rely on adolescent protagonists who
strive to understand their own power by struggling with the vari-
ous institutions in their lives. This trend seems to be one of the
defining factors of the ya novel.
One reason that ya novels originated in the twentieth century
involves the history of adolescence. The word ‘‘adolescent’’ was
only beginning to come into common usage in postbellum Amer-
ica when such writers as Mark Twain and Louisa May Alcott were
writing (Kett 127), even if that is the age group they would have
wanted to identify as the primary audience for their most famous
novels. Products of the romantic movement’s interest in youth,
Twain, Alcott, and scores of other authors available to American
readers (including Charles Dickens, Charlotte Yonge, James Feni-
more Cooper, Robert Louis Stevenson, Martha Finley, Susan War-
ner, Horatio Alger, and Susan Coolidge) wrote novels about youth
that appealed to teenaged readers. Youth readers in the first half
of the twentieth century found books by L. M. Montgomery, the
Stratemeyer Syndicate, Cornelia Meigs, Rudyard Kipling, Kate
Douglas Wiggin, Zane Grey, Frank Merriwell, and Mabel Robin-
son. But adolescence as a social concept did not gain the wide-
spread attention of the American public until G. Stanley Hall’s
Adolescence (1905) inspired four actions that Joseph Kett identifies.
Following Hall’s advice, adults sponsored organized social ac-
tivities (for example, Scouting) for middle-class teenagers, and
the concept of adolescence influenced school administrators to
grapple with the large numbers of teenagers who were entering
high school because industrialization had decreased their eco-
nomic value on farms. Well-meaning theorists wrote a variety of
self-help books for parents seeking to understand their teenagers,
and they guided the vocational guidance movement that was de-
signed to help teenagers negotiate the movement from school to
work (Kett 221). Adolescence as such did not become institu-
tionalized in America until the twentieth century, so it stands to
reason that books marketed specifically to this demographic arose

as a product of the twentieth century. The American Library As-
sociation and the National Council of Teachers of English also
increased attention to the need for better reading material for
school-age children, thereby influencing the caliber of books mar-
keted to adolescents. Moreover, teenagers’ increased economic
resources and social autonomy in the robust economic years fol-
lowing World War II further increased their market power, making
book publishing for older youths an even more attractive industry
than it had ever before been.
Literature specifically written for and marketed to adolescents
came into its own in America when World War II changed the
country’s economy nearly forty years after Hall’s work called at-
tention to adolescence as a psychological phenomenon. Literary
historians frequently cite one of three dates as turning points for
ya literature: 1942, when Seventeenth Summer appeared; 1951, when
The Catcher in the Rye was published; and 1967, when The Outsiders
was published.8 Whichever of these texts a critic prefers to cite as
the wellspring of ya literature, the fact remains that the genre de-
fined itself in English-speaking countries in the two decades fol-
lowing World War II and was understood to be a distinct literary
genre by the end of the 1960s.9 Brown and Stephens note that the
earliest manifestations of the ya novel may have evolved from the
social unrest of the 1960s. They suggest that the lack of positive
adult role models in such books as The Outsiders may well be what
first defined the genre, but that as the genre has evolved, the de-
piction of adults and characterization in general, issues of diver-
sity, the use of point of view, and thematic development have all
become more complex (14 –17). Nevertheless, few literary genres
have had as compact an evolution.10
Young Adult literature shares many characteristics with books
marketed to adults about adolescents. The major intersections be-
tween these two sets involve various types of novels about the
maturation process, including the Entwicklungsroman, which is a
broad category of novels in which an adolescent character grows,
and the Bildungsroman, which is a related type of novel in which
the adolescent matures to adulthood. Entwicklungsromane can be
thought of as novels of growth or development, whereas Bildungs-
romane are coming-of-age novels that are sometimes referred to as
‘‘apprenticeship novels.’’ 11 Understanding the history of literature

about adolescence can help us to understand not only how Young
Adult literature came to exist but also what its ideological and aes-
thetic functions are.
The Bildungsroman and the Entwicklungsroman
Because ya novels evolved historically from the Bildungsroman,

we need to understand the distinction between that term and the
term Entwicklungsroman. The distinction proves useful in helping
to position the ya novel within postmodernism, particularly be-
cause scholars of children’s and adolescent literature have tended
to overemploy the term Bildungsroman in recent years. For ex-
ample, in Children’s Literature and Critical Theory, Jill P. May ques-
tions whether the picture book The Snowy Day has a ‘‘bildungsro-
man pattern’’ because it has a ‘‘home–away–home’’ pattern (41).
Although May decides the picture book is not a Bildungsroman,
throughout her text she implies that all children’s books about
growth are Bildungsroman. But thought of that way, the definition
of the Bildungsroman ceases to have meaning, because what chil-
dren’s book isn’t about growth? Peter Rabbit grows. Max, King of
the Wild Things, grows. Ramona grows. M. C. Higgins grows.
Anne of Green Gables grows. Cassie Logan grows. Harriet the
Spy grows. Christopher Robin grows. Granted, Nancy Drew and
her compatriots in series fiction — paraliterature, as Maria Niko-
lajeva calls the genre (58) — do not necessarily grow. And some
novels like Avi’s Nothing but the Truth (1991) and Cormier’s The
Chocolate War problematize the issue of growth by leaving the
reader wondering who, if anyone, has grown. But the idea of
growth — the investigation of which characters have developed
and which have not — is one of the most common principles in
the study of children’s and adolescent literature. Since novels of
development are Entwicklungsromane, virtually all children’s and
adolescent novels participate in the genre. For purposes of clari-
fication, I tend to refer to Bildungsromane as novels in which the
protagonist comes of age as an adult. If I refer to a novel as an
Entwicklungsroman, that is because the protagonist has not reached
adulthood by the end of the narrative.
G. B. Tennyson traces the coinage of the term Bildungsroman to

a German scholar named Wilhelm Dilthey (in 1870 in a biography
of Friedrich Schleiermacher) (135).12 Hans Heinrich Borcherdt
built on Dilthey’s definition when he formally defined the Bil-
dungsroman: ‘‘first, there is a cultural goal, which is the complete
unfolding of all natural qualities; then there is a clear path toward
that goal. . . . in sum, the movement in the Bildungsroman is a rea-
sonably direct line from error to truth, from confusion to clarity,
from uncertainty to certainty, from, as the Germans have it, nature
to spirit’’ (Tennyson 137). Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship
(1795–1796) is widely regarded as the first Bildungsroman. The con-
cept of the Bildungsroman emerged in an atmosphere nurtured by
the romantic belief in the individual. Only with the establishment
of a widespread cultural interest in individuals’ growth was the
concept of adolescence defined psychologically or explored liter-
arily. Jerome Buckley offers a standard and fairly intricate defini-
tion of the Bildungsroman in Season of Youth. He writes that in the
typical Bildungsroman, a sensitive child grows up in a rural setting
feeling confined by his entire family, but especially by his father,
who cannot understand the boy’s imaginative life. School also
proves restrictive for the protagonist, so he leaves home to go to
an urban center, where he is likely to have at least two romantic
experiences, one of which has the potential to corrupt him and
the other of which has the potential to purify him. His initiation
is complete when, after much soul-searching, he triumphs over
the trials he faces with his parents, with financial resources, with
women, and accepts his own capacity for work and for love (18 –
23). Buckley, then, essentially defines a formula for novels about
adolescence intended for adult readers.
In the original German construction of the term, the Bildungs-
roman is distinct from other genres in that it ‘‘presuppose[s] a more
or less conscious attempt on the part of the hero to integrate his
powers, to cultivate himself by his experience’’ (Howe 6). In other
words, the protagonist’s growth is neither accidental — as say,
Peter Rabbit’s is — nor simply a matter of normal developmen-
tal growth, as Moon Shadow’s is in Laurence Yep’s Dragonwings
(1975); rather, the hero self-consciously sets out on a quest to
achieve independence. The Bildungsroman is therefore an inher-
ently Romantic genre, with its optimistic ending that affirms the
protagonist’s entry into adulthood.13 Buckley identifies David Cop-

perfield, Sons and Lovers, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as
examples of Anglophone Bildungsromane.
One glaring problem with Buckley’s definition (and Dilthey’s
and Borcherdt’s and Tennyson’s) is how androcentric it is. There
is no place in these critics’ definitions for a female protagonist,
even though Buckley tries to fit Maggie Tulliver from A Mill in the
Floss into the pattern. This proves to be something of a procrus-
tean fit for someone trying to demonstrate that the Bildungsroman
is about finding the capacity to love and to work (Buckley 22–23),
since Maggie commits suicide at the end of Eliot’s novel. Annis
Pratt defines why male Bildungsromane patterns do not apply to
women:
In the women’s novel of development (exclusive of the science
fiction genre) . . . the hero does not choose a life to one side of
society after conscious deliberation on the subject; rather, she
is radically alienated by gender-role norms from the very outset.
Thus, although the authors attempt to accommodate their he-
roes’ Bildung, or development, to the general pattern of the
genre, the disjunctions that we have noted inevitably make the
woman’s initiation less a self-determined progression towards
maturity than a regression from full participation in adult life. (36)
Because of a lifetime of living as Other, females experience ‘‘a
division of loyalties between’’ their sense of authentic selfhood
‘‘and the social world of enclosure’’ (25). Pratt implies that there
is basically no such thing as a female Bildungsroman when she says,
‘‘It seems more appropriate to use the term Entwicklungsroman, the
novel of mere growth, mere physical passage from one age to the
other without psychological development, to describe most’’ nov-
els of female development; ‘‘it seems clear that the authors con-
ceive of growing up female as a choice between auxiliary or sec-
ondary personhood, sacrificial victimization, madness, and death’’
(Pratt 36). Elizabeth Abel, Marianne Hirsch, and Elizabeth Lang-
land cite ‘‘inner concentration’’ (8) and intimacy with others (11)
as the chief goals of female novels of development, which they
divide into two patterns: the novel of apprenticeship, such as Mil-
dred Taylor’s Logan family chronicles or Voigt’s Tillerman saga,
and the novel of awakening, which is by definition a novel of an

adult’s rather than an adolescent’s awakening. Catherine Marshall’s
Christy (1967) is certainly not a ya novel, but it is often read by
adolescents, so it serves as one example. Abel, Hirsch, and Lang-
land eschew the use of the term Bildungsroman, identifying it — as
Annis Pratt does — as a suspect construct.
I support their assertion that we should take more care in using
the term Bildungsroman, not merely in an effort to uphold some
sort of precious academic hairsplitting, but because in distinguish-
ing coming of age novels (Bildungsromane) from novels of devel-
opment (Entwicklungsromane), we can pay more attention to the
relationship between power and growth that shapes adolescent
literature. Adolescents in Bildungsromane such as Katherine Pater-
son’s Lyddie (1991) mature into adulthood. Lyddie, in fact, seems to
follow Buckley’s description of the Bildungsroman almost formula-
ically: sensitive Lyddie is emotionally orphaned by a father who
has abandoned her and by a mentally ill mother who eventually
dies. Although Lyddie is embarrassed about being functionally il-
literate, she decides to journey from the family farm in Vermont
and eventually arrives in the mill town Lowell, Massachusetts,
where she is educated in a straightforward literacy narrative by
her coworkers Betsy and Diana.14 She has two sexualized encoun-
ters with men: the first is quite debasing when her foreman,
Mr. Marsden, sexually harasses her; the other is closer to Buckley’s
definition of the purifying romance in that Lyddie’s neighbor
Luke Stephens wants to marry her because he loves her mind.
Upon returning to her home and recognizing how much she has
grown, Lyddie decides to defer marrying Luke until she has gradu-
ated from Oberlin. Her initial reasons for leaving home have
come from a self-conscious recognition that she needs to learn
how to earn a place in the world; her final decision is based on the
epiphany that the only thing limiting her is her own self-image.
She overcomes poverty, ignorance, and personal pettiness. She
learns to balance her own materialism with her love of others and
her love of learning.
Nevertheless, Paterson’s Bildungsroman also fits Abel, Hirsch,
and Langland’s formulation in that Lyddie transfers her affections
from intimacy with her family to intimacy with Luke — she is
never emotionally autonomous — and her greatest lesson stems

from her introspective recognition that she can define who she is.
Her growth also adheres to Pratt’s archetypal patterns: she is at
her emotional strongest in the green world of her Vermont farm;
there she is most likely to feel self-fulfilled. Moreover, her move-
ment into the society of Lowell represents a curtailment of her
freedom, but because this is a novel written for adolescents rather
than adults, Lyddie achieves the type of transcendence Lissa Paul
points out is far more common to children’s than women’s litera-
ture (‘‘Enigma’’ 189). Most important, by novel’s end, Lyddie is an
adult, and she is as fully empowered as it is possible to imagine a
woman of her social construction to be.15 She has achieved the
capacity to work and to love, defying Annis Pratt’s suspicion that
the female Bildungsroman is an impossibility. Barbara White notes
that ‘‘the Bildungsroman concludes on an affirmative note’’ (13), a
pattern in keeping with the traditions of children’s and adolescent
literature. Lyddie is also a romantic novel in a way that is common
to many children’s and adolescent novels because Paterson ulti-
mately affirms the importance of the individual.
But Barbara White also points out that ‘‘many adolescent pro-
tagonists fail even to gain the knowledge or undergo the change
of character required in the initiation story with its much looser
definition’’ (13). Such novels are Entwicklungsromane, novels of de-
velopment, that end before the protagonist reaches adulthood.
Many of the ya novels that emerged in the 1970s that have sub-
sequently been referred to as ‘‘problem novels’’ are Entwicklungs-
romane: the character grows as s/he faces and resolves one specific
problem. But because the time span of the Entwicklungsroman is
more truncated than that of the Bildungsroman, the protagonist of
the problem novel is rarely an adult by the end of the narrative.
Some adolescent novels even contain a major streak of anti-
romanticism in the way that they fail to offer the possibility of
achieving maturity as a form of redemption. A few of these En-
twicklungsromane (some of Cormier’s novels come immediately to
mind) even go so far in denying the individual’s importance within
society that they are actually nihilistic. All but the bleakest of ya
novels, however, affirm the adolescent’s ability to grow at least a
little. Characters in novels of development such as S. E. Hinton’s
The Outsiders or Walter Dean Myers’s Scorpions (1988) grow, even
if they have not achieved adulthood. In these novels, the protago-

nist experiences some form of conflict with authority and learns
something about institutional accommodation within a family, a
school, or a social group.
I think the reason so many people react negatively to a novel
like The Chocolate War has something to do with the way they read
it as failing to fulfill the obligation of the Entwicklungsroman to meet
romantic expectations about growth. Anne Scott MacLeod, for
instance, notes that Cormier’s novels ‘‘violate the unwritten rule
that fiction for the young, however sternly realistic the narrative
material, must offer some portion of hope, must end at least with
some affirmative message’’ (74). Anita Tarr has argued that ‘‘Cor-
mier is irresponsible as a writer’’ for writing a novel that argues
‘‘all of reality is a sham, and that the entire world is evil and there
is no use fighting it’’ (‘‘Does’’ 7). MacLeod and Tarr may well im-
ply that The Chocolate War fails as an adolescent novel because of
their assumption that the genre requires Bildung of some sort. Ro-
mantic that I am, however, I still see redemption at the end of The
Chocolate War. The book opens with the line ‘‘They murdered
him,’’ and much is made of crucifixion imagery in the second and
the last chapters. In the second chapter, Obie recognizes the reli-
gious symbolism of the football field’s goal posts: ‘‘The shadows
of the goal posts sprawled on the field like grotesque crosses’’ (14).
After being corrupted by Archie’s insidious evil, Obie loses that
recognition: ‘‘He looked at the goal posts. They reminded him of
something. He couldn’t remember’’ (190). Presumably, Obie no
longer recognizes Christ and has lost the possibility of redemp-
tion. If Jerry has been crucified, it has been to expiate someone’s
sins. Goober, at least, has seen what has happened; I think Goober
knows that Jerry has died for his sins. Whether Goober will gain
anything by that recognition is a matter open to debate, but at least
one character in this novel has been given the opportunity to
grow. The reader has been offered that opportunity, too. In that
potential growth lies whatever redemption the novel might offer.
Thus, MacLeod and Tarr and I all agree on some implicit level that
adolescent literature is at its heart a romantic literature because so
many of us — authors, critics, teachers, teenagers — need to be-
lieve in the possibility of adolescent growth.
Romanticism, Modernism, Postmodernism
When we identify a book as an Entwicklungsroman because the

protagonist has grown or as a Bildungsroman because the protago-
nist reaches adulthood by the novel’s end, we open ourselves to
investigating the aesthetic philosophy that informs the text. We
can identify Lyddie as a novel influenced by romanticism because
of the way it affirms the individual or we can identify The Chocolate
War as failing to meet the romantic expectations we have of the
conventions of adolescent literature. But in both novels, the pro-
tagonist’s growth is predicated on her or his ability to engage in-
stitutional power. Jerry Renault and Lyddie struggle economically.
They struggle to communicate with other people, especially those
who have authority over them. Both are anxious about their sexu-
ality. Both must confront death. Both garner power by straining
against repression. Foucault points out that power can be simul-
taneously repressive and enabling because those who are compla-
cent are often less empowered than those who gain power by
struggling (History 36– 49; Discipline 195–228). Characters as di-
vergent as Lyddie and Jerry Renault demonstrate empowerment
within repression.
Foucault is the poststructural theorist who typifies social re-
pression as having its roots in the discourses formed by social
institutions to control people’s powers: he is especially aware of
the repression/power dynamic at work in how society regulates
sexuality and the government.16 Those two forces are certainly
major ones in adolescent literature, so it seems to me that the
tension between power and repression in adolescent novels may
well be one of romanticism being reformed by postmodernism.17
After all, the Young Adult novel as we know it came into being
during the 1960s, well into the postmodern era. In other words,
novels of development and of initiation — and for that matter,
children’s literature — evolved during a romantic era when many
authors explored individual psychology, but the ya novel, with its
questioning of social institutions and how they construct indi-
viduals, was not possible until the postmodern era influenced au-
thors to explore what it means if we define people as socially con-
structed subjects rather than as self-contained individuals bound
by their identities.
John McGowan considers romanticism, modernism, and post-

modernism to be various stages of modernity, which he defines as
the cultural condition in which society recognizes that it must ‘‘le-
gitimate itself by its own self-generated principles, without appeal
to external verities, authorities or traditions’’ (McGowan, Postmod-
ernism 3). That is, modernity is the era in which humanity and its
social organizations ceased to be consciously organized around
principles dictated by religious faith. Modernity emerged in West-
ern thinking around 1800 because of several interrelated factors,
including Protestantism’s challenges to Catholicism, increased in-
dustrialization, challenges to imperialism that led to a decreased
sense of Eurocentrism, capitalism replacing feudalism as the chief
principle of socioeconomic organization, and democracy’s chal-
lenge to the divine rights of monarchy (McGowan, Postmodernism
3). One result of modernity was an increased interest in the novel
of development, the Entwicklungsroman.
Romanticism was an early manifestation of society’s effort in
the era of modernity to self-legitimize that focuses on the indi-
vidual’s autonomy as liberating. Romanticism relies on a my-
thology that art is the means of legitimizing society. The artist’s
role is analogous to priesthood, and the cultural faith in tran-
scendent individual growth represents an instance of society self-
legitimizing (McGowan, Postmodernism 5–11). This faith in growth
led to the specific development of the Bildungsroman. In the twen-
tieth century, modernism refined modernity by focusing on ‘‘the
heroic maintenance of the self’’ as providing an alternative to the
depravity of humanity (McGowan, Postmodernism 11). Rather than
art serving as a mythical justification for life, modernist art rep-
resents an antidote to the meaninglessness of capitalist society,
according to McGowan (‘‘Postmodernism’’ 585). The modernist
artist is more monk than priest, a person who operates removed
from society in order to achieve its greatest accomplishments.
Postmodernism, however, acknowledges the triumph of eco-
nomics in determining a cultural self-legitimization. Postmodern-
ism represents a socially self-conscious era of modernity in which
the culture recognizes that some form of unity exists through the
complete domination of capitalism over every aspect of social life
(McGowan, Postmodernism 13). That is to say, if everything in
culture is constituted by discourse and all discourse participates
in the modes of production that enact society, then nothing es-

capes the capitalist institution. We are all subjects constituted by
discourse, so we are all immersed irrevocably in capitalism. As
Fredric Jameson would have it, postmodernism is ‘‘the cultural
dominant of the logic of late capitalism’’ ( Jameson, Postmodernism
46). The role of art in postmodernism then is to serve as a cultural
practice that participates unavoidably in perpetuating capitalism
(McGowan, ‘‘Postmodernism’’ 586). The postmodern artist con-
tributes art to society as her or his means of production. And in
some sense, maturity as transcendence has become impossible
since so many of the markers of maturity are immersed in capital-
ism: driving, voting, buying liquor, obtaining a credit card, and
paying income tax serve as typical rites of passage in postmodern
culture. The Young Adult novel may well be the specific subgenre
of the Entwicklungsroman — the novel of development — that has
emerged from postmodern thinking. (This is not to imply that
Young Adult novels cannot be Bildungsromane. Lyddie, for example,
certainly is.) Young Adult novels are Entwicklungsromane or Bil-
dungsromane that self-consciously explore the individual’s power in
relation to the institutions that comprise her or his existence.
Thus, ya novels may or may not be Bildungsromane, depending
more on the level of maturity the protagonist reaches than any-
thing else.
Entwicklungsromane are projects of modernity in the way they
participate in a mythology of cultural legitimization: our task
as humans is to grow. In the romantic era, the Bildungsroman
emerged from the Entwicklungsroman as a narrative of transcen-
dence: the individual grows into an adulthood of autonomy and
self-determination. In modernism, maturity often takes the form
of a conscious rejection of society; separation, rather than tran-
scendence, serves as the mark of the mature modernist. But post-
modernism, cynical about the transformative power of maturity,
marks growth largely in terms of the individual’s increased par-
ticipation in capitalism. The narrative of growth in postmodern-
ism thus becomes constituted as an acceptance of one’s cultural
habitat rather than serving as a narrative about transcendence or
separation. The postmodern awareness of the subject’s inevitable
construction as a product of language renders the construct of
self-determination virtually obsolete. As a result, the popular-
ity of the traditional Bildungsroman with its emphasis on self-

determination gives way to the market dominance of the Young
Adult novel, which is less concerned with depicting growth rev-
erently than it is with investigating how the individual exists within
society. Growth is possible in a postmodern world, especially if
growth is defined as an increasing awareness of the institutions
constructing the individual. But following World War II, maturity,
adulthood, being harder to define, ceased to be privileged as the
narrative goal in literature written for youth. The Young Adult
novel, then, came into being as a genre precisely because it is a
genre predicated on demonstrating characters’ ability to grow into
an acceptance of their environment. That is, the ya novel teaches
adolescents how to exist within the (capitalistically bound) insti-
tutions that necessarily define teenagers’ existence.
The ya novel allows for postmodern questions about authority,
power, repression, and the nature of growth in ways that tradi-
tional Bildungsromane do not. Note that the Bildungsroman affords
the protagonist slightly more social power at the end of the novel
than an Entwicklungsroman does. Since most ya novels are Entwick-
lungsromane that end before the protagonist reaches adulthood, few
of them depict their protagonists as fully enfranchised within their
culture. In other words, Bildungsromane tend to allow for adoles-
cents to overcome the condition of adolescence by becoming
adults. As adults, they have relatively more social power than they
had as adolescents. If we make the mistake of collapsing all ado-
lescent literature into the rubric of the Bildungsroman, we miss the
power differential between novels of development and coming-
of-age novels. We also ignore the strain of romanticism that per-
meates the genre, but even worse, we elide the power structures
at work in adolescent literature, rendering them virtually invisible.
If we acknowledge the paradigm shift, however, we can perceive
the relationship between the genre of the ya novel and the epis-
temological issues that engendered its emergence.
Ultimately, paying attention to the generic structures in adoles-
cent narratives can help us classify literary patterns (that is, distin-
guishing Bildungsromane and Entwicklungsromane) and help us to
identify the history of ideas working itself out in literature (rec-
ognizing the influences of romanticism, modernism, and post-
modernism at work in a book). But more important, in recogniz-
ing how the generic characteristics that define the ya novel are
both historically and aesthetically constructed, we can better ana-
lyze the entire genre. Much ink has been spilled over definitions
of adolescent versus ya literature, but in my mind the real issue
resides somewhere in the relationships between our romantic
beliefs in growth, our postmodern awareness of the socially
constructed limitations of power, and the adolescent’s interactions
with Ideological State Apparatuses as social institutions (such as
how we construct sexuality, death, school, religion, gender, or
family). Children’s books are often about power and repression:
Peter Rabbit, Max, and Ramona learn how to control their own
personal power; Wilbur gains self-control over his fear of death.
But the nature of power and repression that adolescents experi-
ence is far more outwardly focused, whether they develop as in an
Entwicklungsroman or if they do achieve maturity, as in a Bildungs-
roman. And indeed, adolescents do not achieve maturity in a ya
novel until they have reconciled themselves to the power entailed
in the social institutions with which they must interact to survive.
I would submit that Young Adult literature has exploded as an
institution in the postmodern era because although it affirms
modernity’s belief in the power of the individual implied by the
very essence of the Entwicklungsroman, even more, it very self-
consciously problematizes the relationship of the individual to the
institutions that construct her or his subjectivity. The basic differ-
ence between a children’s and an adolescent novel lies not so
much in how the protagonist grows — even though the grada-
tions of growth do help us better understand the nature of the
genre — but with the very determined way that ya novels tend to
interrogate social constructions, foregrounding the relationship
between the society and the individual rather than focusing on Self
and self-discovery as children’s literature does.
chapter 2
‘‘I don’t know the words’’

institutional discourses
in adolescent literature
vi’s Nothing but the Truth ends with the statement, ‘‘I don’t
A know the words’’ (177). Nothing but the Truth is a post-

modern novel about a ninth-grader named Philip
Malloy who gets expelled from Harrison High School
for creating a disturbance during a broadcast over his school’s
public announcement system of ‘‘The Star-Spangled Banner’’
(177). His admitting that he does not know the words to the
anthem provides an ironic twist to the story’s resolution because
his suspension has created a national media frenzy. Ostensibly, he
has been suspended for trying to sing the national anthem during
morning announcements in his homeroom. Local politicians have
asserted the boy’s right to salute his country, but Philip’s teacher
asserts that he was intentionally creating a disturbance because she
recently gave him a failing grade that led to his suspension from
the track team. During the course of events, she is forced to re-
sign. Philip ultimately transfers to another school, where he finally
admits that he has never known the lyrics to the national anthem.
His admission, ‘‘I don’t know the words,’’ serves as a metaphor
for adolescents’ position within many institutional cultures. Philip
knows there are words — he knows that the language he needs to
navigate within the institution exists — but he does not always
have the capability of accessing those words. He is effectively si-
lenced by three institutions that purport to empower people:
school, family, and local government. Yet despite being denied full
access to the language of institutional discourse, Philip has re-
markable authority over his own destiny and the destiny of his
teacher. He has access to the national media. He has access to the
local school board. He can get a teacher fired. Yet he cannot com-
municate effectively enough with his own parents to stop the
chain of events that follows when he first hums along during the
22 : Institutional Discourses
broadcast of the national anthem. Foucault would note how Philip

operates within a ‘‘domination-repression’’ model of institutional
structure. The boy is invested in succeeding in the school — he
wants to run track there — so he cares enough to test the limits
of his power, but when he finds that limit, he is himself disem-
powered. If Philip loses in his institutional struggle, it is because
he misperceives what power he has within the economy of his
culture. His father, who claims to lack ‘‘a position of power’’ at
work, urges his son, ‘‘Don’t let them push you around’’ (56–57).
As Philip tries to defend himself, one series of miscommunica-
tions builds upon another, demonstrating how institutions derive
their power from the discourse people use.
Social institutions are determined by discourse, and they exist
for the purpose of regulating social power, which is why Althusser
refers to them as ‘‘Ideological State Apparatuses’’ (155). They use
language simultaneously to repress and to empower their con-
stituents; they gain power from the very people whom they regu-
late. As isas, social institutions also use language to regulate one
another. In the case of the U.S. government, the Constitution
designates three institutions to provide a system of checks and
balances: the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the
government both sustain and regulate one another in a series of
written and verbal interactions. Humans grow to maturity trained
in the ways of such institutions; families, schools, and religious
institutions all take an active role in educating children how to
engage the institutional power afforded to individuals. The train-
ing invariably depends on language of some sort.
When we investigate how social institutions function in adoles-
cent literature, we can gain insight into the ways that adolescent
literature itself serves as a discourse of institutional socializa-
tion. Because institutions are myriad in number, I have chosen to
focus on four that recur often in ya novels: government politics,
schools, religion, and identity politics. As institutions with clearly
defined goals of training children and adolescents, both schools
and religion serve as sites of empowerment and repression for
many adolescents. The role of politics in adolescent literature ap-
pears more subtly: relatively few novels deal directly with the role
of the state in regulating teenagers’ power. But many novels deal
with this concept either metaphorically or by demonstrating the
Institutional Discourses : 23
ways that teenagers are affected by government policies or are

socially constructed by identity politics, including race, gender,
and class. Virtually every adolescent novel assesses some aspect
of the interaction between the individual adolescent and the insti-
tutions that shape her or him. When adolescent novels problem-
atize institutions, they instinctively explore the issues of language
in which the institution is immersed. Thus, as I interrogate how
institutions interact with individuals in adolescent literature, I will
also explore pertinent discursive issues. Novels about politics
make manifest how ideology is a discursive construct. Novels set
in schools demonstrate the paradoxical nature of the carnival-
esque at work in literature. Novels that include religious topics
foreground what it means for an institution to be comprised of
competing voices, and novels that deal with identity politics dem-
onstrate absence as a powerful discursive tool.
Politics
According to Foucault, political institutions work because

people give the ruler power. Modifying Rousseau’s concept of the
social contract, Foucault argues that ‘‘power has its principle not
so much in a person as . . . in an arrangement whose internal
mechanisms produce the relation in which individuals are caught
up’’ (Discipline 202). He borrows the concept of the panopticon
from Jeremy Bentham to demonstrate the power potential in an
institution such as a prison. Bentham imagined the panopticon as
the model of the perfect prison. He envisioned prison cells con-
structed in the shape of a wheel, with the interior walls open to
the center of the circle. In that central point would be constructed
a round watchtower from which guards could view all the cells at
all times. Foucault argues that the possibility that prisoners were
being watched would elicit their good behavior. In other words,
Foucault asserts, the social contract with a state is not maintained
so much by members of the society being watched by a constantly
vigilant government as much as it is maintained by the members
of the society fearing constant surveillance. They voluntarily give
up any negative social behavior that might manifest itself as social
control for fear of the state’s reprisal.
Yoshida Junko has argued that this model shapes the social
structure of the school in Cormier’s The Chocolate War. Defining
The Vigils as the watchtower and Trinity as the prison they regu-
late, Yoshida demonstrates how the adolescents at Trinity willingly
cede their power to their perceived dominators in order to escape
possible punishment (110 –112). As a result, The Vigils have com-
plete control of Trinity, even usurping the authority of their
schoolmasters. In that sense, The Chocolate War is the same sort
of dark adolescent fantasy that Lord of the Flies is: when adoles-
cents achieve total control, they become totally corrupt. Both
novels are metaphors for the concept that absolute power cor-
rupts absolutely.
Many critics have metaphorical interpretations for the politics
at work in The Chocolate War. Anne Scott MacLeod argues that
what happens at Trinity is a microcosmic metaphor for American
politics (75), while Perry Nodelman interprets the chocolate war
as a metaphor for the Vietnam War (Nodelman, ‘‘Robert Cor-
mier’’ 102). Jan Susina interprets The Vigils as the Mafia (171), and
Cormier himself has identified big business as the central meta-
phor of the novel (DeLuca and Natov 119). At the heart of all
these interpretations is the recognition that The Chocolate War is a
political novel. It is an investigation of social organization and
how individuals interact with that organization. The novel com-
municates that institutions are more powerful than individuals,
but that individuals who engage their own power can affect the
shape of the institution. Cormier implies that as social organiza-
tions, institutions are not to be trusted.
Few adolescent novels are as direct as Cormier’s are in address-
ing government as a form of social organization, although almost
all adolescent novels are informed by ideologies that are political
in nature. That is, all novels are influenced by their authors’ socio-
political beliefs. Basing his arguments on the work of Althusser,
Peter Hollindale notes that ideology is not ‘‘a political policy, . . .
it is a climate of belief’’ (‘‘Ideology’’ 19). As I tell my students, we
believe some ideologies so deeply that we consider them Truth:
such ideologies as ‘‘education can improve people’s lives’’ and ‘‘it’s
better to be rich than poor’’ can be difficult for people brought up
in capitalist societies to recognize as arguable positions.1 But all
adolescent novels are informed by such sociopolitical beliefs.
Laura Ingalls Wilder, for example, infuses her own libertarian ide-
ologies into all of the Little House books, but most especially into
the later books written for adolescents. Although in actuality the
Ingalls family was closely connected to their neighbors during the
historical season of blizzards depicted in The Long Winter (1940),
Wilder portrays the fictionalized Ingalls family as living entirely
isolated in self-sufficiency. Influenced by libertarianism, her ideo-
logical goal was to portray government intervention as both un-
necessary and suspicious (Fellman 101–116). William Sleator’s
House of Stairs (1974), Robert Cormier’s I Am the Cheese (1977), and
Virginia Hamilton’s The Gathering (1981) provide similar ideologi-
cal critiques of government politics.
William Sleator’s disturbing science fiction novel House of Stairs
bears all the ideological marks of the 1970s post–Vietnam era’s
fears. In Sleator’s novel, the government funds a research study
on the possibility of using operant conditioning to alter the behav-
ior of five orphaned teenagers. They are isolated in a horrific in-
stitution, a structure filled with nothing but stairs. The five par-
entless adolescents engage in endless power struggles with each
other and with the machine that supplies their food. Three of the
teenagers, Blossom, Oliver, and Abigail, are particularly adroit at
manipulating the situation because they rely on traditional gender
roles to do so. The two more androgynous characters, Peter and
Lola, resist repression and are eventually able to escape the evils
of the government’s efforts to condition them, although the price
they pay is a harrowing emotional toll. The reader can deduce
several political ideologies from House of Stairs : fear institutions;
fear the government; fear those who rely on traditional gender
roles to gain power; and trust that resistance leads to empower-
ment. This last ideology makes the novel particularly nuanced be-
cause it does not shy away from depicting both the good and the
bad of the dynamic between power and repression that informs
so many teenagers’ lives. They may rebel against institutions, but
the rebellion will come at a cost.
Cormier’s I Am the Cheese is an even more assertive indictment
of the American government as an institution. The protagonist’s
family participates in the federal government’s witness protection
program because his father is a journalist who needs protection
from organized crime. The family’s new name is ‘‘Farmer,’’ the
protagonist becomes ‘‘Adam’’ because he is the first Farmer.

Mr. Farmer teases his son, singing ‘‘The Farmer in the Dell’’ to
him to emphasize the interrelationship of the members of their
family. But when the federal agent charged with protecting the
family turns on them and Mr. Farmer and his wife are killed,
Adam enters the government’s so-called protective custody and
becomes subject to mind control in an effort to erase his knowl-
edge that the government played a role in killing his parents.
Adam defines himself as the cheese who stands alone in an ironic
interplay of discourses between children’s culture and political cul-
ture. The nursery rhyme ‘‘The Farmer in the Dell’’ describes aptly
his political situation.
His incarceration and subsequent interrogation are defined in
terms of the tension between children’s culture and adult political
culture. Like a child, his language is limited because he ostensibly
suffers from amnesia and does not have the words to connect his
present condition to his past. Like the protagonist of Nothing but
the Truth, Adam does not know the words he needs to know to
escape his current situation. But as he gains access to language and
enters into discourse with the adult agent of the U.S. government,
Adam regains partial memories, so his knowledge appears to be
increasing. The agent interrogating him encourages the boy to re-
veal what he remembers about his past, but Adam’s refusal to do
so probably saves his life, since the agent will surely kill him if he
reveals having any knowledge of his father’s murder. The agent
eventually recommends that the government either kill Adam
or drug him into total amnesia, so the betrayal of Adam’s trust
is complete. The novel is thus a cynical commentary on post-
Watergate American politics: Because Adam has been betrayed by
a government he once thought benevolent, he becomes paranoid
of the government having too much power, just as Cormier
implies many Americans feel betrayed by the government and
therefore paranoid about government control. If Adam lives in a
panopticon of government agents and medical personnel trying
to elicit information from him before they ‘‘terminate’’ him, so
perhaps do we all.
It is significant that the currency in the interaction between the
individual and government as an institution in I Am the Cheese is
language. The dynamic between Adam’s memory and his ability

to articulate narratives about his past is a fluid one: he appears at
once powerless while he cannot remember the words to describe
his past and powerful because the government is so interested in
his loss of memory. As he gains access to language, he develops
the power to intimidate the government agent — but if Adam re-
veals too many of his memories, he will become completely pow-
erless because he will be killed. As long as Adam can control his
utterances, he can control his position within the government. He
may appear to be passive; he may appear to be a victim; but he
still has enough power in this situation that his life has some value
to the government, so he remains alive. Access to discourse both
endangers Adam and saves him from the American government.
Interestingly, as long as he is caught in this dynamic, he cannot
become an adult. We can measure his power by the fact that his
story could never be classified as a Bildungsroman.
Although most adolescent novels are not this directly involved
in political commentary, they invariably reflect some cultural
biases, most of which are likely to be veiled in ideological dis-
courses that affirm widely held societal views. Avi’s Nothing but the
Truth affirms the importance of education, for example; Harper
Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) condemns racism. When ideolo-
gies in ya novels focus specifically on government, they tend to
convey to adolescents that they are better served by accepting
than by rejecting the social institutions with which they must live.
In that sense, the underlying agenda of many ya novels is to in-
doctrinate adolescents into a measure of social acceptance.
Virginia Hamilton’s The Gathering is one such political novel.
The story is the third book of the Justice trilogy in which four
telepathic children travel into the future to affect a positive change
for the dystopia they find there. Their development hinges on
their belief that they have the power to improve the world. Justice
is the leader of ‘‘the unit,’’ as they call themselves collectively; her
twin brothers, Thomas and Levi, and their friend Dorian work
with her to create this telepathic unit. They call the dystopia of
Earth’s future ‘‘Dustland.’’ The primitive cultures they find there
fight to sustain life in a world filled with dust that has resulted
from thermonuclear accidents, war, and natural disasters. The
planet is populated with a number of mutants, implying that the

war has been a nuclear war. Eventually, Justice and the unit
discover that several ‘‘domities’’ exist on the planet. These are
computer-controlled cities built under domes where species are
preserved and everyone is happy . . . because the computer that
regulates the climate infuses sedatives into the air.
Reminiscent of Hal in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey,
the computer called ‘‘Colossus’’ has too much power. Unlike Hal,
however, Colossus has rejected its own evil. That evil transforms
itself into a distinct entity that calls itself ‘‘Mal.’’ Mal is a Lucifer
figure ejected from paradise who takes it upon itself to banish any
nonconformist creature from the domity into the hell of Dust-
land: ‘‘Mal must have order and sameness’’ (124). Justice and the
unit discover that although nonconformity is not tolerated in the
domity, the rebels who live in Dustland have become stronger,
hardier people for having endured adversity. The unit eventually
destroys Mal so that the Colossus becomes capable of accepting
difference and integrating it into life in the domity. That a group
working as a whole defeats a tyrant creates a typical American
commentary on political structures: democracies are preferable to
single rulers.
Several of the book’s other ideologies surface as political beliefs
shared by many Americans. The book is a proenvironmentalism,
antiwar narrative that participates in the ongoing dialogue about
nuclear proliferation during the Cold War in the same way that
Sylvia Engdahl’s Enchantress from the Stars (1970) and Madeleine
L’Engle’s A Swiftly Tilting Planet (1978) do. The Gathering also pro-
motes a positive ideology involving racial pride because Justice
and the unit are accomplished black children who are clearly po-
sitioned as the saviors of their world and of the future. Moreover,
the scene when they lead the rebels through the underground pas-
sage in Dustland to the domity reads much like a tale about the
Underground Railroad, Moses leading his people out of Egypt, or
like a reverse journey of the Middle Passage.
Slakers, whose myth was that they would never again go be-
neath the dust, were outraged at going under.
Still, all who were left of the gathering went under. Dust rose
on both sides. They could not see ahead of them. They hurried.
There was no darkness, some sickness, but again they could not
see in front of them. They passed through indescribable color
beyond the light spectrum they knew.
It is a divide, spoke the unit to itself. It is what separates
Dustland from what really is beyond it. The color divide is the
final barrier to another place. (63)
Color (wrongly) separates these people, just as perceptions of ra-
cial color wrongly separate people in America. Once the refugees
from Dustland are inside the domity, Thomas points out that dif-
ferent species in the city are separated from one another in a social
grouping he identifies as segregation (76). Hamilton is relying on
the reader’s knowledge of history to impart the antislavery ide-
ology embedded in the text. Her allusion to the Middle Passage is
not overt. But the ideology of antiracism is indeed direct. Hamil-
ton expects her readers to consider segregation evil. Moreover,
Hamilton links race and gender when the android who serves as
the unit’s tour guide is bemused at the children’s tendency to seg-
regate themselves by gender (83). Mal, after all, has banished an-
other species that relies on distinct genders because ‘‘all must be
the same here’’ (125). Gender difference is not tolerated in this
culture, but species do not intermingle, either.
These elements add up to create a story about the necessity and
beauty of diversity. Written at the beginning of the Reagan era, at
a time when the advances made by the Civil Rights movement
had begun to be ignored, when preppies were prevalent and the
concept of ‘‘yuppies’’ was born, when the Religious Right had
gathered more strength than it had had in America since the
1920s, and when a feminist backlash had begun to take place, The
Gathering demonstrates what happens when an entire culture re-
quires itself to look alike or think alike. No one is unhappy, but
no one is completely happy, either. People are drugged and mind-
less. To demonstrate the problem with this model of conformity,
Hamilton employs a music metaphor. One Dustlander the chil-
dren bring into the domity cannot conform to the group he is
assigned. He is maladjusted because he thinks that the song he
is supposed to sing in harmony with his group is tedious com-
pared to the songs he sang in his former life, when he was leader
of both the hunt and the song in the dust outside of the domity.
Singing together can be empowering, but not if the group is lim-

ited to only one song.
The Gathering links conformity to issues of power. Twice, the
android in charge of the domity tells the children a rationalization
for control that sounds compatible with Nazism: ‘‘ We control for
the efficiency of the result’’ (79) and ‘‘there is efficiency in control’’
(109). The computer Colossus and its alter ego Mal have complete
power over all inhabitants of Dustland and its domities, so they
are the only institution of significance in this culture. Hamilton
makes clear that any institution with absolute power is ultimately
untenable for several reasons, but mostly because ‘‘nothing, no
one is perfect,’’ as Justice puts it (116). Humans have created the
supercomputer that rules Dustland, so it, too, is fallible as the ma-
chine’s expectations that humans can live without diversity or
without conflict eventually demonstrates. The computer’s efforts
to eliminate conflict — well intentioned as they originally are —
result in the dehumanization of humanity.
In promoting the tolerance of diversity, The Gathering extols the
virtues of nonconformity that occur within the social contract.
Thomas, the book’s rebel, loses his lifelong stutter only when he
finally rejects the jealousy and anger that have dominated his life.
As the doppelgänger of his twin brother, Levi, Thomas is the evil
twin, the dark twin. He overcomes his malevolence so that he can
exist in the world peacefully. He still plays his kettledrums, violat-
ing the mores of a typical teenager in small-town Ohio, but since
this nonconformism hurts no one, the social institutions within
which he exists tolerate the behavior. His destructive temper,
however, is extinguished, implying to the reader a difference be-
tween constructive and destructive rebellion. It is only after hav-
ing witnessed an all-powerful institution that Thomas recognizes
as corrupt that he can give up his own pretensions to complete
domination of other people. He accepts his place in the social
contract only after having tried to violate it and after having wit-
nessed the results of a large-scale violation of the social contract
perpetrated by the supercomputer that regulates humanity in the
domity. Most significant, the metaphor for his acceptance of the
power that institutions have over him is a discursive one: when
he does not accept his role in any domination-repression model
institution, he cannot participate in his culture’s discourse because
of his stutter. When he accepts the limitations institutions place

on him, he becomes discursively fluent. He can speak without
stuttering.
In order to understand the political ideologies at work in books
like The Long Winter, I Am the Cheese, or The Gathering, the reader
has to understand at least two things: the historical context in
which the story is set and the historical context in which it
was written. The distinction is especially important for historical
novels like The Long Winter, when the historical setting is signifi-
cantly removed from the date of the novel’s publication. As Fred-
ric Jameson puts it, ‘‘Always historicize!’’ (Political Unconscious 9).
Analyses of ideology within historical context help determine the
‘‘particular forms of signification which play a particular political
role in particular historical societies’’ (Bennett 146). Readings that
ignore context to emphasize ‘‘some universal, invariant form of
cognition to which there is attributed an invariant political effect’’
result in ‘‘aesthetic’’ readings that are necessarily incomplete (146).
Investigations of political discourse at work in adolescent fic-
tion often occur in history classes: historians frequently teach
Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) as a parable of popu-
lism.2 The Colliers’ My Brother Sam Is Dead (1974) and Esther
Forbes’s Johnny Tremain (1943) are often taught in conjunction with
American history classes. But it is not enough to use novels to
teach about the historical period in which they are set. These nov-
els are themselves historical artifacts of the time period during
which they were written, so My Brother Sam Is Dead imparts anti-
Vietnam sentiment whereas Johnny Tremain questions American in-
volvement in World War II. And these novels deal with the place
of the individual in relation to the government as a political insti-
tution. All of them grapple with the individual’s relationship to the
institution in terms of power and control, and all of them imply
that the individual is inevitably affected by her or his institutional
affiliations.
School
The concept of school as a social institution is omnipresent in

adolescent literature. The classic Bildungsroman describes the pro-
tagonist’s education, and many Entwicklungsromane are set in school

environments. Beverly Lyon Clark defines a specific subset of
adolescent literature, the traditional School Story, as a story set at
a school (usually a boarding school) that is addressed to children
from the point of view of a child. The text is usually middle-class
in its perspective (Clark 3). If the canonical boys’ version of these
books can be said to have a formula, it is this: they cover a broad
range of years, from an ordinary boy’s arrival at the school
through his years of service to older boys until he is himself one
of the older boys at the school. Two types of adventures occur:
competition at physical activities, such as sports, and some sort of
social conflict that allows the text to explore morality. The tale
may conclude with an affirmation of the school’s purpose in train-
ing young people to take their place in the status quo of the social
order (Clark 4). Certainly girls’ school stories serve the same ideo-
logical purpose, which is the most important purpose of School
Stories; their agenda to indoctrinate children into the social order
is thinly veiled.3
Since American ya novels are usually Entwicklungsroman, they
are far more likely to focus on one set of problems than they are
to show a character developing over a period of time as School
Stories generally do. But although the time line of the plot may be
telescoped, the function of the narrative remains the same: school
serves as an institutional setting in which the protagonist can
learn to accept her or his role as a member of other institutions.
M. E. Kerr’s Is That You, Miss Blue? (1975) demonstrates the fusion
of the School Story and the problem novel. Flanders Brown is a
sophomore sent to boarding school at the class-conscious Charles
School, an Episcopal school for girls in Virginia. Flanders’s par-
ents are recently divorced because her mother left her father in
search of an identity independent of his. Flanders’s ‘‘problem’’ is
that she feels unwanted; her feelings of rejection are exacerbated
because her mother is sleeping with a younger man and her father
is exposed on national television as a charlatan who dabbles in sex
therapy as a form of religion. But in watching the Charles School
use its institutional power to persecute Miss Blue, one of the
teachers who is a religious fanatic, Flanders gains the empathy
she needs to forgive her parents. Her crisis and resolution occur
during the course of a semester rather than over the course of
several years, as would be traditional in a School Story. But as an

Entwicklungsroman, Is That You, Miss Blue? affirms the possibility of
individual growth within a corrupt culture without taking that in-
dividual all the way to adulthood. Nevertheless, the book demon-
strates how in rejecting one institution — the Charles School —
an adolescent like Flanders can eventually embrace the institutions
that are vital for her continued growth: in this case, the institution
of family.
Is That You, Miss Blue? also typifies how schools function as in-
stitutions in ya literature. School serves as the metaphorical rep-
resentation of the many institutions that will influence adolescents
throughout their lives. Kerr even beats the reader over the head
with the school-as-microcosm motif when she writes, ‘‘Boarding
school is like a little world, with all the lessons of the large one
taught in minuscule’’ (168). School settings exist in adolescent lit-
erature to socialize teenagers into accepting the inevitable power
social institutions have over individuals in every aspect of their
lives. Some ya novels are sanguine about this process; others are
cynical, but if these novels have an element that purports to em-
power teenagers, that sense of uplift is often balanced by the ac-
knowledgment that although social institutions give in adolescent
literature, they also take away.
The schools in Daniel Pinkwater’s stories demonstrate this
phenomenon nicely. In Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars (1979),
Leonard Neeble meets Alan at their school, Bat Masterson. That
Pinkwater has named his school with an approximate anagram of
the word ‘‘masturbation’’ conveys the book’s jovial lack of respect
for school as an institution. Yet it is the discipline meted out to
them by this institution (when Alan is suspended and Leonard is
given a psychological leave of absence) that frees them to have a
set of adventures that includes interplanetary communication and
telepathic journeys to another plane of existence. The boys have
rebelled at Bat Masterson and so must be institutionally repressed,
but they, ironically, transform the repression into far greater em-
powerment than they had previously had. Most significantly, after
Alan returns to live in his hometown on Mars, Leonard adopts a
new set of friends and learns to navigate the social culture of Bat
Masterson. He still periodically rebels by intimidating his teachers
with his advanced knowledge, but he does so within parameters
acceptable to them. After all, as Leonard puts it, ‘‘There’s a gentle

art to bugging teachers. You have to sort of pace yourself, or you’ll
spoil it’’ (245). The same can be said of pushing any institutional
boundary.
The dynamic of (over)regulation → unacceptable rebellion
→ repression → acceptable rebellion → transcendence-within-
accepted-limits is a common one in ya novels set at schools. All
of Leonard Neeble and Alan Mendelsohn’s ‘‘astromental’’ esca-
pades in Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars result from the boys’
rebellion against their school. The adolescent characters in Is That
You, Miss Blue? rebel against the merged institutions of church and
school at the Charles School before they make peace with their
parents. Holden Caulfield rebels against Pencey Prep before he
accepts the larger society he once rejected as phony. A book radi-
cally different from Kerr’s and Pinkwater’s and Salinger’s, Wilder’s
The Little Town on the Prairie (1941), even exhibits this pattern. Only
after the children rebel against Miss Wilder’s inappropriate use of
discipline does Laura become herself empowered to serve as a
teacher. Adolescents have to fail at one form of institutionally
proscribed rebellion before they find an institutionally tolerated
form of rebellion that paradoxically allows them to remain within
the system.
The paradox of rebelling to conform sets up enough ironic ten-
sion that subversiveness against school authorities becomes a
source of humor in many ya novels. In Sue Townsend’s The Secret
Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 3⁄4 (1982), for example, the headmaster
of Adrian’s school calls the entire school to an assembly:
Mr. Scruton got up on the stage and acted like the films of
Hitler. He said in all his long years of teaching he had never
come across an act of such serious vandalism. Everybody went
dead quiet and wondered what had happened. Scruton said that
somebody had entered his office and drawn a mustache on
Margaret Thatcher and written ‘‘Three million unemployed’’ in
her cleavage. He said that defiling the greatest leader this coun-
try has ever known was a crime against humanity. (172)
That the vandal proves to have been a teacher makes the subver-
siveness all the more successful from the narrator’s point of view.
In another comic novel, Paul Zindel’s The Pigman (1968), John
details how to detonate firecrackers in the bathroom at schools

and outlines how to orchestrate an entire class in a timed activity
called a ‘‘supercolossal fruit roll’’ designed to terrify substitute
teachers (2). The subversiveness stays with teenagers long after the
plot does: my husband remembers nothing about The Pigman ex-
cept how to bomb a bathroom, and I modified the supercolossal
fruit roll quite effectively when I was a junior in high school. Per-
haps that behavior even served to empower me because subse-
quent teachers were terrified of our class. If Freud is right that the
purpose of humor is to release people from their feelings of so-
cial restraint, then much of the antiestablishment humor pitched
against school authorities in ya literature is right on the mark.4 As
David Russell notes, ‘‘comedy represents a rebellion against rules
imposed by society’’ (118).
Rebelling against school authorities often serves the same func-
tion in adolescent literature that carnivals played in medieval Eu-
rope. According to Bakhtin, carnivals were:
Sharply distinct from the serious official, ecclesiastical, feudal,
and political cult forms and ceremonials. They offered a com-
pletely different, nonofficial, extraecclesiastical and extrapoliti-
cal aspect of the world, of man, and of human relations; they
built a second world and a second life outside officialdom, a
world in which all medieval people participated more or less.
(‘‘Rabelais and His World’’ 197)
John Stephens notes how often the carnivalesque in children’s
(and adolescent) literature teaches children to question the social
order (120 –121).5 Much of the humor and virtually all of the re-
bellion in adolescent novels about school rely on carnivalesque
departures from the status quo to lull the adolescent into eventu-
ally embracing it. By providing for an emotional outlet, antiestab-
lishment humor helps teenagers reconcile themselves to living
with the establishment.
Understandably, teenagers experience school as a site in which
they are simultaneously repressed by authority and peers and in
which they are liberated by socializing with their friends and by
learning new ideas. Adolescent characters from Amy March to
Weetzie Bat enjoy learning in an environment with other teenagers
even while they detest the repression they experience at the hands
of their teachers. Only once they rebel against authoritarian rep-

resentatives of the institution are they able to grow. Gene Forres-
ter and his friend Phineas, for example, define freedom as reject-
ing the strictures of their school in A Separate Peace. The narrator
explains that ‘‘Phineas didn’t really dislike West Point in particular
or authority in general, but just considered authority the necessary
evil against which happiness was achieved by reaction, the back-
board which returned all the insults he threw at it’’ (10). Without
rules, Phineas would have no raison d’être, because ‘‘Finny’s life
was ruled by inspiration and anarchy, and so he prized a set of
rules’’ (25). The boys are empowered by breaking the rules, but
when during one of their pranks Finny falls from a tree, breaking
his leg badly enough that he is crippled, Gene begins to under-
stand the purpose of rules: ‘‘If you broke the rules, then they
broke you’’ (61– 62).
Gene carries a burden of guilt because jealousy for Finny’s
achievement led him to bounce on the tree branch in the first
place. Gene has caused his best friend’s fall. His feelings of re-
sponsibility intensify after Finny breaks his leg a second time and
dies during the corrective surgery. Gene recognizes that his own
inner turmoil has caused evil; he achieves maturity only when he
accepts that the enemy that needs quenching is the enemy within.
His own unruly nature is the enemy, not the institution against
which he has been rebelling. He has achieved the Victorian spiri-
tual enlightenment that is foundational in the Bildungsroman as a
genre. A Freudian might argue that Gene’s superego has learned
to regulate his id, or a Bakhtinian might say that the pressure-
letting function of the adolescent’s carnivalesque actions has
served its purpose. Either way, Gene has internalized the neces-
sary message: rebellion is good to a point. It helps adolescents
release pent-up energies, perhaps even prevents worse disruptions
of the social order. But the rebellion is only portrayed as effective
in literature as long as it ultimately serves to sustain the status quo
at some level. If rebellion goes uncontained, it becomes problem-
atic. Thus, Gene conforms to the expectations his culture places
on him. Gene has felt restricted, has rebelled, has faced terrible
consequences, and is ironically most empowered when he finally
embraces the very restrictions he rejected in the first place. Gene
as an adult narrates his Bildungsroman, so we know he has grown

to accept his place in society. As an adult, he seems to exist within
his culture far more functionally than he did as an adolescent.
The Chocolate War takes that theme one step further. Jerry tries
to stand up to corruption at his school and is effectively killed for
his efforts. As Brother Leon and Archie, leader of The Vigils,
struggle to assert their power over one another, the reader gradu-
ally begins to realize that it does not matter which of them con-
trols the school, since they are two sides of the same coin. They
collude in the ultimate punishment of Jerry because they are both
individuals who mistake the power they have within an institution
for individual power. Archie celebrates his own power over The
Vigils as an organization (30, 168); then he rejoices at how ‘‘pow-
erful the organization had become’’ (55). Archie expresses his
power in a discourse shaped by sexual language, ‘‘Archie alone was
always under pressure, devising the assignments, working them
out. As if he was some kind of machine. Press a button: out comes
an assignment. What did they know about the agonies of it all?
The nights he tossed and turned? The times he felt used up,
empty?’’ (30). Patricia Campbell makes note of a scene Cormier
omitted from the final version of the novel in which Archie, im-
potent in the face of Jerry’s defiance, achieves masturbatory cli-
max after he devises a plan by which he can control Jerry (Camp-
bell 41). Archie and Brother Leon are enmeshed in a homoerotic
triangle: first the chocolate sale, then Jerry Renault serve as the
object of exchange between the two men. The culmination of
their relationship occurs as they watch Jerry’s broken body carried
away in an ambulance after the melee of the boxing match, an
adolescent carnival if ever there was one. Brother Leon then puts
his arm around Archie to shield him from another teacher’s wrath,
‘‘And Archie realized that Leon was still in command, still in the
position of power’’ (188). The avenging teacher stalks off. ‘‘Archie
and Leon watched him go. Archie smiled inside. But he masked
his feelings. Leon was on his side. Beautiful. Leon and The Vigils
and Archie. What a great year it was going to be’’ (189). Archie has
rebelled and been rewarded in a triumph of the carnivalesque.
The open alliance between the two forces of evil in the school is
made more menacing by the implied homophobia in Cormier’s
text: the reader is meant to despise these two males who are so
corrupt that they have reached the ostensible pinnacle of de-
bauchery, homosexuality.
Despite the insidious homophobia that infuses The Chocolate
War, Cormier intends adolescents to understand that it is their
moral obligation to disturb the universe, to rage and fight against
the Archies and the Leons of the world lest the dark forces of the
carnival gain too much power. The reader, then, must serve as the
J. Alfred Prufrock of this text: s/he must decide whether to dis-
turb the universe. Jerry’s defeat challenges adolescent readers to
temporarily destroy the social order so that it may ultimately be
preserved.
Religion
The Chocolate War and Is That You, Miss Blue? involve the inter-
section of school and religion as institutions, since both books are
set at church schools. Adolescent novels that deal with religion as
an institution demonstrate how discursive institutions are and how
inseparable religion is from adolescents’ affiliation with their par-
ents’ identity politics. Adolescents in such novels eventually ex-
perience language determining not only their religious beliefs, but
also creating competing dialogues that influence their own reli-
gious views. Moreover, such novels depict how religion influences
identity politics, especially those of race, class, and gender. Chaim
Potok’s The Chosen (1967), Laurence Yep’s Dragonwings (1975), and
M. E. Kerr’s What I Really Think of You (1982) all interrogate the
interaction between discourse and teenagers’ sense of their identi-
ties in relation to their perceptions of their parents’ identities. And
all of the protagonists in these novels experience some form of the
(over)regulation → unacceptable rebellion → repression → ac-
ceptable rebellion → transcendence model that typifies the domi-
nation-repression model of institutional discourse common in
adolescent literature.
Reuven Malter narrates the story of his friendship with the con-
siderably repressed Daniel Saunders in Potok’s The Chosen, begin-
ning with their first meeting in 1944 when they are fifteen and
continuing until they graduate from college. Reuven and Danny

are both Jewish boys living in New York, although Danny’s family
is far more conservative than Reuven’s, since Danny’s father is a
Hasidic rabbi. Danny is expected to become his community’s next
rabbi. Much of the story involves Danny’s tense relationship with
his father and how the boy eventually fulfills a different destiny
than the one his father has chosen for him. But initially, Danny
and Reuven identify completely with the roles their fathers expect
them to play. Danny wears the earlocks and traditional garb worn
by the Hasidic community; Reuven wears the prayer shawl and
yarmulke his father expects him to wear. Reuven is a Zionist like
his father; Danny supports the anti-Zionist movement that his
father promotes, even though the boy is personally sympathetic
to the establishment of a Jewish national state. Both boys adhere
to their fathers’ diets, and neither questions the legitimacy of the
Ten Commandments that are the foundation of their faith. Both
boys are comfortable with the complete dominance of male voices
in their families: Reuven’s mother is dead, and Danny’s mother
has a chronic illness that makes her little more than a shadow in
the plot. For both boys, God is entirely masculine. In this novel,
as in many about religious beliefs, religion becomes a matter of
personal identity; whole communities of Jews define themselves
entirely in terms of their religious identity. And that identity is
determined solely by patriarchs.
Reuven’s relationship with his father serves as a foil to Danny’s
relationship to his father. Reuven’s father is a professor, so he
wants his son to become a professor. Yet because the two have
such a close relationship, Professor Malter readily accepts his son’s
decision to become a rabbi. Professor Malter fervently believes
that because of the Holocaust, America needs more rabbis to re-
build Judaism, so he sanctions his son’s choice. Reb Saunders
eventually blesses his son Daniel’s decision to become a psycholo-
gist, but only after he has subjected his son to more than a decade
of a silent treatment devised to teach his son compassion. ‘‘The
heart speaks through silence,’’ he explains to his son the day they
finally discuss Daniel’s refusal to become a rabbi (265). Reuven
has described the silence as ‘‘weird’’ (191) and ‘‘bizarre’’ (209); it
seems unnatural to him that a man so language-oriented that he
will spend hours debating the meaning of one scriptural passage

would refuse to allow any emotional discourse to take place be-
tween him and his son.
When contrasted with the many competing voices in the novel,
Reb Saunders’s silence with his son seems especially profound, but
it also helps to explain the discursive nature of Judaism. Informed
by the Torah, the Talmud, and its commentators; expressed in
lengthy prayers and myriad chants and songs; factionalized by
many schisms and political debates, Judaism as it is depicted in The
Chosen is a religion determined entirely by language as an attempt
to capture the ineffable spark of God that exists within each per-
son (263). The religion itself demonstrates Bakhtin’s concept of
heteroglossia: competing voices interact with one another, influ-
encing the shape of the whole (Dialogic Imagination 269–275). The
Jews in this story engage in intricate and contentious interroga-
tions of holy scripture and endless debates about its interpretation
as a way to demonstrate God’s presence in their lives, but they are
unified in their grief for the six million Jews murdered in the Ho-
locaust. Within the narrative itself, Hasidic Jews and the Orthodox
Jews they call ‘‘apikoros’’ (meaning ‘‘sinners’’) compete for the
dominant dialogue that will define what it means to be Jewish.
Their competing voices, in turn, determine the dialogic nature of
The Chosen, for it is a novel filled with competing dialogues. In one
instance of the type of meticulous discourse that informs Judaism
for Reuven, he spends four three-hour class periods explicating
nine lines of the Talmud in one of his college classes that includes
Jews who are both Hasidic and Orthodox. When he has com-
pleted his explanation, his professor asks him an unanticipated
question that no one, including Reuven, can answer. After a
lengthy silence, the professor tells him, ‘‘no one can explain it. . . .
The truth is, I cannot explain it myself. . . . A teacher can also
sometimes not know’’ (236). The narrative implies that if there is
only one thing Jews can agree on, it is that discourse is ultimately
inadequate to explain God fully.
Reb Saunders, however, has employed a different tack from the
discourse-rich culture that surrounds him: he has been virtually
silent with his son, ostensibly to teach him compassion. The
rabbi’s exercise in noncommunication seems to have achieved its
purpose, for his son is indeed compassionate when he graduates
from college. Danny even concedes that the terrible price he has
paid in not having an emotional relationship with his father may
have been worthwhile when he admits to Reuven’s father that if
necessary, he will follow the same child-rearing methods with his
own son. For a young adult obsessed with language — he has
taught himself German so that he can read Freud in the original
— the concession seems a startling one, until the reader recog-
nizes that Reb Saunders’s actions have replicated God’s to some
degree. A believer may be surrounded by religious discourse, but
few people actually experience the direct spoken word of God
expressed to them individually. Believers are like Danny: they
know God’s love exists, just as the boy knows his father loves him,
even if it is not expressed in direct personal discourse. The Chosen
implies that we are all Daniels, surrounded by human discourse
but still living necessarily in the silence, the aporia — the gap of
unknowability — that results from our inability to engage in dia-
logue with the supreme deity. The Chosen thus constructs patriar-
chal silence in metaphorical contrast to discursive conflict as a way
to communicate the final authority of that-which-lies-beyond-
discourse. Poststructural thinking may not allow for any institu-
tion to exist outside of language, but Chaim Potok’s The Chosen
does. As Naomi Wood notes, ‘‘religion in children’s literature
functions as a mechanism of social ordering’’ (1). Children and
adolescents taught to believe in the omnipotence of an unseen
patriarchal deity who must be obeyed are indeed receiving ideo-
logical training that represses them.
Just as various forms of Judaism compete to form the discourse
of The Chosen, various aspects of Chinese theology compete to
influence the protagonist of Laurence Yep’s Dragonwings. When he
arrives in America in 1903, Moonshadow is an eight-year-old Chi-
nese immigrant. His father belongs to the Company of the Peach
Orchard Vow, a collaborative group of men whose religion is tra-
ditional Chinese ancestor worship, although one member of the
company is Buddhist (23). The leader of their group refers to their
home as ‘‘a superior home for superior men’’; he is ‘‘fond of the
phrase ‘‘the superior man,’’ which he has borrowed from Confu-
cian philosophy (21). Moonshadow and his father, Windrider,
believe in reincarnation and practice filial piety; they make trib-
utes to the Stove King to honor the Jade Emperor, the Lord of
Heaven and Earth. Weimen Mo and Wenju Shen describe the re-
pression of children at work in Chinese children’s literature that
advances ideologies of filial piety; their work makes manifest the
ethics of ‘‘subservience and humiliating sacrifice’’ required of child
characters who practice filial piety faithfully (22). In Dragonwings,
Moonshadow is subservient to his father, Windrider, who believes
himself to be the reincarnation of a dragon. He believes this be-
cause in a vision, the Dragon King has told Windrider that in his
former life, he was ‘‘the greatest physician of all the dragons’’ (38).
Windrider believes that in this life, he must repent of his former
pride. Only by learning to live humbly and serve others can he
regain his status as a dragon. Windrider decides to atone for his
sins by learning to fly, and his son’s needs become secondary to
his own.
Windrider experiences a number of competing discourses, not
least of which is the complete disdain of the members of his com-
pany for his spirituality. None of the company of the Peach Or-
chard Vow is willing to believe that the Dragon King has spoken
to Windrider. Mocking him, they dismiss the vision as a dream.
How the reader interprets the conflict between Windrider and his
friends even positions the reader in the middle of competing dia-
logues about the book’s genre. If the members of the company
are right and Windrider has dreamed his conversation with the
Dragon King, the book is completely realistic, that is, the events
in the book are probable. But if Windrider has indeed had a vision,
the book is actually a fantasy: it is not feasible in the tangible world
as we know it.
Yet another competing dialogue comes from Windrider’s sense
of duty to his wife and son. Building a flying machine saps his
family’s resources so that they must live in poverty while he
proves himself. With information he learns from the Wright
brothers, he builds an aeroplane and flies for a few moments. In
the ensuing crash, however, he decides that ‘‘there’s more to be-
ing a dragon than just flying. . . . Dragons have immense families
too. . . . And it may be that my final test is to raise a brood
of superior women and men’’ (242). Windrider’s decision to syn-
thesize the competing dialogues of living a pious life and sup-
porting a family into a spiritual life that includes both makes it
easier for the Company of the Peach Orchard Vow to resolve
their differences with Windrider. In the end, although Moon-

shadow develops in a growth pattern typical of an Entwicklungsro-
man, Windrider’s growth is the more dramatic growth of the Bil-
dungsroman, for he experiences the education, the spiritual growth,
and the ability to balance work and love that are common to that
genre. That Yep demonstrates an adult experiencing competing
institutional dialogues as he grows to maturity is an unusual but
laudatory strategy in an adolescent novel. But for Moonshadow,
spirituality is a matter of both sacrifice and reward, of both en-
abling intellectual freedoms and confining social behaviors. And
religion is defined as patriarchally for Moonshadow as it is for the
characters in The Chosen. His father and the men of his company
affect his spirituality far more than any of the women in his life do.
Religion dictates social behavior for many teenagers in fiction.
Reuven and Danny in The Chosen attend the schools they do, eat
the foods they do, and choose the careers they do because of their
reactions to religious dictates placed on them by their fathers. In
Dragonwings, Moonshadow believes his father’s dreams of flying
because of the filial piety expected of him by his religion. The
boy sacrifices his own sense of community and his education to
support his father’s spirituality. And Opal Ringer in Kerr’s What I
Really Think of You is forbidden the peer-pressure-defined material
comforts she desires. Moreover, she is pressured by her parents
to adopt a gender role that upholds biblical teachings. Her parents
expect her to be submissive and to follow scriptural dictates. Like
Danny and Moonshadow, Opal renounces secular comforts and
gender equality because her father’s approval proves more impor-
tant to her than rebellion.
What I Really Think of You alternates between two first-person
narrators, Opal Ringer and Jesse Pegler. Both teenagers have fa-
thers who are preachers, although like the two main characters in
The Chosen, one character belongs to a more conservative sect of
the same religion since Opal’s father is more evangelical than the
charismatic televangelist Guy Pegler. The tension between these
teenagers and their fathers is exacerbated by the Oedipal struggle
both of their elder brothers are staging with their fathers. Thus,
not only does Opal have to negotiate the disparities between her
sense of self and her father’s sense of self, but she also has to
watch her brother, Bobby John, negotiate a far more painful rift
with their authoritarian father, while Jesse watches his brother,

Bud, negotiate a similar rift. The four children of these two au-
thoritarian men are understandably perplexed by the role of reli-
gion in their own thinking; they confuse religious authority with
their fathers’ authority. Opal’s father reminds her brother that ‘‘a
child should be beholden to his father’’ (3). Jesse cannot seem to
love God because he cannot love his father. When Opal experi-
ences a religious transformation that unifies her relationship with
her father, Jesse feels more estranged from his religious heritage
than ever. He identifies as his worst fear becoming the type of
religious leader his father and brother are (150).
For Opal, the tension between the secular life and religious life
is defined as a series of discursive dichotomies. She positions her
narrative as a tale she is telling an unsympathetic audience: ‘‘You
always used to laugh. I never had to do much more than just show
up and you’d all start nudging each other with grins starting to tip
your mouths’’ (1). She describes herself as a ‘‘have-not’’ in conflict
with others who are ‘‘haves’’ (19) and often wonders such things
as whether she would choose between eating off china plates with
sterling cutlery or joining Christ in the Rapture (65). For her, the
two things are incompatible. As a result, she experiences a Carte-
sian struggle between her thoughts and her flesh: ‘‘I got to won-
dering again what death was, anyway, and if there really was a Sa-
tan’s hell, or was it all words and no one really knew anything, just
made things up’’ (63). Her mother tells her that ‘‘rapture’’ and ‘‘ec-
stasy’’ are ‘‘ Words, honey. Words can’t always say what things
mean,’’ driving at the split between ideas and the physical world
that so troubles Opal (122). She further identifies religion as more
discursive than tangible when she tells her mother that the Rap-
ture is not ever going to come: ‘‘ We just always say it’s coming
when we can’t take what’s already here’’ (140). Just as televangelist
Guy Pegler has learned that appearances matter more than sanc-
tity in his televised business of saving souls, Opal feels disen-
chanted when she suspects religion is more a matter of rhetoric
than of practice. And like Guy Pegler’s sons, Opal suspects her
parents use religious authority to assert their parental authority
over her.
Two ironic actions further complicate the notion of religious
authority in What I Really Think of You. Jesse Pegler’s father rejects
him because he is not pious enough to meet his father’s standards.

Offsetting Guy Pegler’s hypocrisy is one of the only noble actions
in the narrative: Jesse promises to care for a dying man’s dog,
thereby mitigating the old man’s final concern. Guy Pegler profits
from his son’s action by broadcasting it on his show, and his
church inherits all of the man’s assets. Jesse, on the other hand, is
happy simply to have alleviated someone else’s emotional pain. As
the book ends, he is still disaffected from his family and church,
but he seems to accept himself. He has rebelled against his father’s
religious institution and found transcendent peace. Meanwhile,
Opal has spoken in tongues, herself enacting a ritual for which
she once derided her mother. The once-questioning Opal is the
most ardent Christian in the narrative by its conclusion. She re-
veals that ‘‘what she really thinks’’ of the ‘‘haves’’ to whom the
story is addressed is that she loves them, even though they have
systematically excluded her from their ranks. Her religious fervor
is perhaps sullied, however, by its exact coincidence with her fall-
ing in love with Jesse’s older brother, Bud. The cynical reader
might question the nature of the passion Opal feels. Kerr is cer-
tainly asserting an ideology that blind faith is, indeed, blind.
The Chosen, Dragonwings, and What I Really Think of You portray
religion as an institution that is patriarchal and discursive. Com-
peting discourses defined largely by their fathers lead the charac-
ters in these novels first to rebel and then to accept some variation
of the status quo that is socially acceptable. For all of these char-
acters, accepting or rejecting their father’s heritage becomes cen-
tral to their ability to exist within the status quo. They cannot find
a place in the culture at large until they understand the discourses
of their own religious culture.
Identity Politics
‘‘Identity politics’’ refers to the social affiliations that members

of any society construct to position people in relationship to one
another. Although certainly not constituted as monolithic institu-
tions, identity politics nevertheless take on institutional dimen-
sions in the ways that people who share affiliations conform to
the expectations of their identified social position. Religion is one
type of identity politics: Jews define many behaviors in terms of

their religious behaviors, as do Christians, Muslims, or Buddhists.
Social class constitutes another form of identity politics: people
of various social classes often conform to the mores of their cul-
ture without even realizing they are doing so. Those who rebel
against the mores of their social class are still identified in terms
of the institution they are rejecting: their behavior as rebels is
defined in terms of what they reject about social class as an
institution.
Identity politics are a social construction. That is, they are de-
fined by discourse, not biology. Social constructions play a deter-
mining role in how we perceive ourselves politically. Gender, it
has been argued, is a political construct, constructed to repress
women. As Barbara Johnson puts it: ‘‘the question of gender is a
question of language’’ (37).6 The same is certainly true of race:
racial difference and racism are embedded in discourse. Indeed,
Henry Louis Gates Jr. focuses on the trope of the signifying
monkey precisely because that trickster figure is a discursively
aware figure. Gates asserts that a meta-awareness of discursive-
ness informs all African-American literature (xx–xxi). Moreover,
he provides Ralph Ellison’s discursively self-conscious definition
of blackness to support the contention that race is situated in
discourse:
It is not skin color which makes a Negro American but cultural
heritage as shaped by the American experiences, the social and
political predicament; a sharing of that ‘‘concord of sensibili-
ties’’ which the group expressed through historical circum-
stance and through which it has come to constitute a subdivi-
sion of the larger American culture. (quoted 121)
Not biological factors but cultural heritage, which is determined
by language, creates racial difference in America. Cornel West in-
sists that racism can be analyzed only if we consider it in terms of
discursive conditions that allow for racism, in terms of the insti-
tutions that perpetuate it, and in terms of the experiences of domi-
nation and resistance in the lives of African Americans (268).
Race, like gender, is an institution that is inseparable from dis-
course and power.
Just as race and gender are issues in Virginia Hamilton’s dysto-
pia The Gathering and Laurence Yep’s Dragonwings, race, gender, and
class create another type of defining institution in adolescent lit-
erature: identity politics. These concepts serve as institutions be-
cause the behaviors of large numbers of people are regulated in
terms of identity politics. And whether people self-select the char-
acteristics associated with a group or whether those characteristics
are imposed on them by the perception of others, their sense of
affiliation with a group serves in some way as a limiting factor.
Take the example provided by the stereotypes in the title of John
Gray’s book alone: Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. Some
people accept such stereotypes, others reject them, but all mem-
bers of the gendered group ‘‘men’’ are subjected to certain sets of
societal expectations typified by these stereotypes, as are members
of the group women. Even the rebellions of those who reject gen-
der roles are at least partially determined by a societally shared
concept of the institutions of femininity and masculinity.
Gender and race constitute identity politics that are, as Robyn
Wiegman notes, too often determined by an ‘‘epistemology of the
visual’’ (8): we define race and gender in terms of physical appear-
ance. Although a character like the androgynous protagonist of
Peter Pohl’s Johnny, My Friend (1985) confounds the epistemology
of the visual by cross-dressing and although a character like the
protagonist of Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929) demonstrates that it is
possible for some people to use temporarily the epistemology of
the visual to their advantage, Wiegman’s analysis of gender and
race is one of many that problematizes how relying on looks to
define identity leads to essentialism — that is, defining people’s
‘‘essential’’ inner traits as biologically determined.7
Identity politics matter most in adolescent literature, however,
in terms of how an adolescent’s self-identifications position her
within her culture. How an adolescent defines herself in terms of
race, gender, and class often determines her access to power in
her specific situation. We can surface the myriad intricacies that
affect identity politics in a ya novel if we ask ourselves, ‘‘ Who
controls the discourse in this narrative?’’ Mae Gwendolyn Hen-
derson suggests analyzing the ‘‘dialogic of differences’’ and the
‘‘dialectic of identity’’ to get at the power struggles embedded in a
narrative. She defines the ‘‘dialogic of differences’’ as the dis-
courses that occur between the Self and Other and the ‘‘dialectic
of identity’’ as the dialogue with Self that occurs internally (19).

She further complicates the tension at work in a text by breaking
her analysis into ‘‘competing and complementary’’ discourses, so
that the critic is confronted with at least four levels of discursive
analysis: those moments when the individual competes with the
Other, those when s/he agrees with the Other, those when s/he
affirms herself, and those when s/he experiences internal discord
(23). Analyzing these discursive levels in Mildred Taylor’s The Road
to Memphis (1990) demonstrates how one character, Cassie Logan,
defines herself in terms of the institutions of race, class, and
gender.
When Cassie describes the black community in which she lives
in southern Mississippi, she employs a discourse of consensus.
She notes the ways that the black families help each other, and the
picture she portrays of this community is one of relative harmony.
Cassie and her brothers are even able to maintain a long-term
friendship with a white boy, Jeremy Simms, who claims, ‘‘folks is
just folks’’ when asked why he refuses to participate in the racism
that surrounds him (41). His comment marks the ability for an
interaction between individual and Other that is marked by con-
sensus, not conflict. But when Cassie describes the interaction
between the rest of the white community and the black commu-
nity in Strawberry, Mississippi, she demonstrates discursive con-
flict with the Other. Local boys terrify her friend Harris, first
taunting him, then forcing him to run as the ‘‘coon’’ in their ‘‘coon
hunt.’’ The horrible wordplay that the boys are enacting shows
the power of language to harm: Harris never recovers either emo-
tionally or physically from having physically enacted the racial epi-
taph ‘‘coon.’’
Another of Cassie’s friends, Moe, also shows the relationship
between discourse and action. Although he suffers through the
indignity of this same group of white boys rubbing his head for
luck, when they begin making lewd comments about Cassie the
discourse of conflict overwhelms him, and he strikes all three of
them with a tire iron. Cassie and her brother Stacey help Moe
escape to Memphis with the help of their white friend Jeremy.
And on the road, they experience another discursive situation
fraught with conflict when a white gas station attendant refuses
Cassie access to the rest room. Because of the physical urgency
she is feeling, Cassie stands outside the open rest room door,
tempted to go in despite the posted sign that reads ‘‘white la-
dies only’’ (177). Cassie experiences an internal conflict with her
own identity as she contemplates this situation: ‘‘I knew perfectly
well the kind of trouble I’d be in if I disobeyed the signs. I knew
perfectly well that I would be breaking the law if I did. Still, as I
stood there facing those signs I felt such an anger, such a hostility,
such a need to defy them that I couldn’t walk right on past’’ (177).
Cassie attempts to violate the institutional structures that prohibit
her from urinating because of this internal conflict. She is willing
to ignore the words on the door, even though she knows they are
signifiers of the discursively constituted law upheld by the govern-
ment in Mississippi, to preserve her own sense of self. She places
her hand on the rest room door, pushes it open, and is immedi-
ately prevented from relieving herself by a white woman who ver-
bally accosts her. Although Cassie has not technically broken the
law since she has neither entered the facility nor used it, the dis-
cursive conflict that erupts at the gas station becomes physically
violent. Trying to run away from the attendant, who also verbally
abuses her, Cassie slips and falls. He kicks her ‘‘like somebody
with no heart would kick a dog’’ (179). She feels so humiliated she
is stunned beyond language. In Cassie’s interaction with the white
Other, she feels temporarily transformed into an animal. Her con-
flict with the Other is so great that she no longer shares a language
with him. This passage depicts powerfully the horror of power
differentials that go unchecked: the gas station attendant physi-
cally assaults Cassie because he knows he is privileged by the dis-
course of his culture that allows white people power over black
people, males power over females, and adults power over teenag-
ers. Knowing that nothing in the institutions within which she
must exist can protect her, Cassie falls silent, as Jeremy Simms falls
silent when his friends accuse him of racism (77), as Cassie and
her friends fall silent when confronted with their white peers’ rac-
ism (68, 117–118, 122). When racism is stronger as an institution
than any discursive power these adolescents have, they retreat
from discourse with the Other as fully as they can. They rely in-
stead on an internal dialogue, an identity discourse of consensus,
that allows them to self-affirm even though the Other refuses to
legitimize them.
Gender is also reinforced as an institution in this culture, as it

is in all cultures, by discourse. Cassie experiences the discourse as
conflict with the Other when her grandmother nags her to be
more feminine, when white boys treat her as a sex object, and
when her own brother silences her (48, 68, 90 –91, 95).8 She deni-
grates marriage as an institution that would hinder her education:
‘‘Body had to take care of some man and a whole bunch of chil-
dren, she wouldn’t ever have time for school’’ (146). She recog-
nizes the power differential between men and women in her cul-
ture. Because she does not like it, she knows to limit the number
of men who will have power over her by remaining celibate. Her
girlfriend Sissy provides a foil relationship when she gets pregnant
by a boy who ultimately dies. By the end of the novel, the once
eloquent Sissy seems to be one of the least powerful characters in
the novel. Her final utterance is a scream when she acknowledges
her fiancé’s death: like those confronted with racism, she retreats
from language when the discourse reinforcing her powerlessness
becomes too overwhelming (280).
Offsetting Cassie’s discourse of conflict with the Other about
gender is her discourse of consensus with herself. She is a char-
acter who enjoys her own femininity, thinking as she looks in a
mirror, ‘‘I was pretty and I knew it. I didn’t think much about it,
though. It was just one of those things I was, and I didn’t dwell
on it, except for when I had on something especially nice and was
wanting to look my best’’ (58). Later, she thinks, ‘‘I was quite
pleased with how I looked’’ (82). She even allows herself to enjoy
feeling sexual attraction to a lawyer she meets on the way to Mem-
phis, Solomon Bradley. When he kisses her, she thinks, ‘‘those few
seconds had been enough to make me feel what I had never felt.
My legs were weak. My body was trembling. My thoughts were
racing. My head was in a cloud and all my thinking was blurred’’
(252). Cassie enjoys looking good because she enjoys the sexual
power she has over men, but she also discovers that she enjoys
experiencing a sense of being overpowered by a man’s sexuality.
That her thoughts are both racing and blurred indicates the dy-
namic of her internal discourse about gender: she is at once think-
ing many things and thinking indistinct things. She is enjoying her
own power and someone else’s. Cassie may rebel against the way
women are treated in her culture, just as she rebels against the
way whites treat blacks, but that does not mean she wants to be-
come what is to her the Other: she feels self-acceptance of herself
as black and female. That Cassie is able to maintain an affirmative
discourse of identity with herself about sex and race demon-
strates that adolescents can be empowered within — and despite
— identity politics as institutions.
Knowledge of racism and sexism allows Cassie some degree of
power — when she recognizes totalizing discourses, she can reject
them. Her inability to recognize the class discourse that surrounds
her, however, makes her more subject to its oppression. As Jame-
son notes, awareness of class-consciousness is a precursor to re-
sisting oppression (Political Unconscious 289). Many of the indi-
viduals who experience racist discourse in this novel as conflict
between the Self and Other are simultaneously experiencing the
oppression of class privilege. Their seeming lack of awareness
about the power that economics plays in this situation exacerbates
the discourse of conflict. None of the characters acknowledges
anything more about the unfairness of social class than their desire
to own land because they recognize that tenant farming makes it
impossible for sharecroppers (black or white) to make a profit.
Taylor, however, is careful to embed class tensions into the nar-
rative. The white boys who taunt Harris, Cassie, and Moe carry
the markers of poor whites in the way that their clothing, their
language, and their actions are depicted. These boys clearly per-
ceive themselves as superior in social class to middle-class blacks
like the Logan family. Yet Taylor does not attribute racism only to
whites of a certain class: the sheriff of Strawberry, clearly educated
and clearly possessing more material wealth than Jeremy Simms’s
family, refuses to believe that Jeremy would willingly help Moe
escape punishment for assaulting three white boys with a tire iron:
‘‘ We gotta believe that, all of us. We know that he wouldn’t be
turning his back on his own. We know that’’ (275). Moreover, the
two white males in the text who refuse to participate in the dis-
course of racism come from vastly different classes: Jeremy Simms
is poor and Mr. Jamison, the lawyer who gives Moe advice, is
upper–middle class. Thus, although the narrative situation pro-
vides the reader with knowledge that social class contributes to
oppression, the characters seem unaware that racism feeds the
class dialectic. Their lack of knowledge contributes to their lack
of social power, for when they fight racism or sexism, they are
more empowered than when they do not.
Terry Eagleton maintains that the task of the trained reader is
to read such ‘‘absences’’ as Cassie’s failure to recognize the power
embedded in social class in order to make ‘‘manifest those condi-
tions of its making (inscribed in its very letter) about which it is
necessarily silent’’ (43). Foucault focuses on the process of reread-
ing, of returning to ‘‘those things registered in the interstices of
the text, its gaps and absences’’ (‘‘ What’’ 135). To Jameson, class-
conscious reading is imperative, given that art cannot be removed
from its ‘‘cognitive and pedagogical dimensions’’ (Political Uncon-
scious 50). Readers trained to pay attention to tensions that arise
from such narrative silences can experience both a richer reading
of the narrative and a better understanding of the role of discourse
in regulating the relationship between power and knowledge in
their own cultures. Ideally, teenage readers will also feel less re-
pressed by the authoritarian social forces they perceive operating
on them.
The ya novel, a genre that has emerged as an aspect of post-

modernism, situates the individual as both comprised by institu-
tional forces and compromised by them. Adolescents have power
that becomes institutional power as they (necessarily) engage in
the social forces that simultaneously empower and repress them.
Multiple institutions affect the teenager: government agencies
that regulate foster care and juvenile justice, Hollywood and Mad-
ison Avenue, the music industry, institutions such as Scouts and
4-h, which were initiated for the specific purpose of channeling
teenagers’ power. All ya novels depict some postmodern tension
between individuals and institutions. And the tension is often
depicted as residing within discursive constructs. Once protago-
nists of the ya novel have learned to discursively negotiate their
place in the domination-repression chain of power, they are usu-
ally depicted as having grown, satisfying the conventions of the
Entwicklungsroman.
I have tried in this chapter to demonstrate some principles that
affect the dynamics of power and repression that individuals ex-
perience as institutions construct them. Numerous discursive is-
sues surround these dynamics, so readers aware of ideologies, of
the carnivalesque, of heteroglossia, and of the need to identify

textual absences should have a variety of approaches with which
to analyze adolescent characters’ relationships to the institutions
in their lives. Whether the institution under investigation is gov-
ernment, school, religion, identity politics, or another institution
altogether matters less than the acknowledgment that institutions
rely on language to regulate the individual’s authority throughout
the genre of the Young Adult novel.
chapter 3
‘‘Maybe that is writing, changing things

around and disguising the for-real’’
the paradox of authority in
adolescent literature
e can investigate power and repression in ado-
W lescent literature by analyzing textual discourses

about institutional politics and social construc-
tion. We can also assess how adolescent literature
is itself an institutional discourse that participates in the power
and repression dynamic that socializes adolescents into their cul-
tural positions: characters created by adult writers test the limits
of their power within the context of multiple institutions for the
benefit of adolescent readers who supposedly gain some benefit
from experiencing this dynamic vicariously. Central to the con-
struction of adolescent literature as a tool of socialization is the
issue of how adult writers depict authority in the literature. The
ways authority can be represented in adolescent literature are far
too various for any one analysis of the genre to cover, but two
manifestations of authority are representative of the ways literary
texts model adolescents internalizing their place within a culture’s
power structure. The first of these, the relationship between par-
ents and adolescents, testifies to the significance of adolescents’
construction of the power/repression dynamic: adolescent char-
acters themselves often create repressive parental figures to domi-
nate them. The adolescents, in turn, rebel against this perceived
domination in order to engage their own power. This phenome-
non is observable in Jean Webster’s Daddy-Long-Legs (1912) and
Hamilton’s Planet of Junior Brown (1971). The power struggles they
create and resolve are internal to the text. The conflict with parent-
as-authority-figure seems to be one of the most pervasive patterns
in adolescent literature. Unsurprisingly, these rebellions against re-
pression frequently prove to be redemptive for adolescents.
But since we know that it is not actual adolescents but adult
authors who are constructing the repressive relationships that ul-
Paradox of Authority : 55
timately prove liberating to adolescent characters, we also need to

investigate a second level of textual authority, that which resides
within the narrative structure itself for the purpose of affecting
the reader’s subjectivity. Writers are another source of authority
within adolescent literature as an institution. Investigating the
ways that they employ aspects of narrative structure to manipulate
the reader reveals much about the adolescent reader’s potential
empowerment and repression. Such novels as Hamilton’s Arilla
Sun Down (1976) and Chris Crutcher’s Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes
(1993) demonstrate how issues of authority are embedded in the
narrative structure of ya novels.
The study of textual narrative authority shows how pervasive
authority and control are in teaching adolescent readers to accept
power/repression relationships as inevitable, for the very con-
struction of an ideologically positioned implied reader often dis-
places adolescent readers’ potential for empowerment. In other
words, studying parent figures in ya novels shows how often
adolescent characters embrace repression as a precursor to em-
powerment, whereas studying narrative structure demonstrates
that ya novels teach adolescent readers to accept a certain amount
of repression as a cultural imperative. Thus, both characterization
and narrative structure are wedded to adolescent literature’s func-
tion of communicating to adolescents about cultural power and
repression.
Parents and Textual Authority
The role of parents in adolescent literature is one of the defin-

ing characteristics of the genre. Since Anglophone cultures, by
and large, usually accept as a given the premise that adolescents
must separate from their parents in order to grow, the literatures
of these cultures reflect the same bias.1 Thus, although children’s
novels often have absent parents so that the child protagonist is
free to have an adventure (as in Alice in Wonderland, The Children of
Green Knowe, Zeely, or From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frank-
weiler), the child often returns to some sort of parent-based home
by the end of the narrative. Perry Nodelman implies that the core
value of children’s literature is ‘‘security,’’ so when children return
56 : Paradox of Authority
to home and family at the end of a children’s book, they are doing
so to achieve a sense of security (Pleasures 78 –79). Parents of teen-
agers constitute a more problematic presence in the adolescent
novel because parent-figures in ya novels usually serve more as
sources of conflict than as sources of support. They are more
likely to repress than to empower. Danny’s rejection of his father’s
religion in The Chosen, for example, is in part a Freudian attempt
to castrate his father, but the boy’s desire to disempower the man
is a direct result of Danny’s experience of being patriarchally re-
pressed. Even if parent figures are absent from an adolescent
novel, their physical absence often creates a psychological pres-
ence that is remarked upon as a sort of repression felt strongly by
the adolescent character. This absence then becomes, in turn, a
presence against which the adolescent character rebels. When
adolescent characters transform an absent character into a pres-
ence against which they can rebel, they are creating a parent who
is present as logos, as Word, through which and against which to
develop.
That the adolescent would rely on the Symbolic Order to create
a parent figure is a central tenet of Freudian and Lacanian analysis.
Roderick McGillis provides an accessible overview of many con-
cepts important to Lacanian analysis as they apply to adolescent
literature. I quote here at length because of the elegance with
which McGillis defines a complex topic:
Lacan articulates the notion of the ‘‘Other’’ most famously in
his essay on the ‘‘mirror-stage’’ of development (see Écrits 1–7).
This stage occurs when the infant — sometime between the
ages of six and eighteen months — becomes aware of herself
or himself when faced with his or her image in a mirror. What
the infant sees is an illusion, a reversed image of the self that
appears to be someone else and yet is discernibly the self. The
moment for Lacan is crucial, for it initiates what he refers to as
the ‘‘Imaginary’’: that is, a relationship with the world based on
the image, on what one sees and how one is seen. The Imagi-
nary is pre-verbal, yet it also continues to exist once the child
enters what Lacan calls the ‘‘Symbolic,’’ the world of language
and the laws that language brings. Essentially, the mirror stage
inaugurates what Lacan terms a misrecognition (méconnaissance)
because the subject observes what appears to be an ‘‘Ideal-I,’’ a

person whole and entire, capable and independent. The attach-
ment to this ‘‘Ideal-I’’ is ambiguous because the ‘‘Ideal-I’’ re-
mains something both devoutly to be desired and irritatingly
out of reach. (McGillis, ‘‘Another Kick’’ 42)
The child enters the Symbolic Order upon learning language.
Lacan demonstrates that at this stage, it is not so much the actual
father that a child rebels against, it is the symbolic father who
interferes with the child’s desire for his mother that creates the
conflict within the child’s mind. Lacan describes the Symbolic Or-
der into which a child enters when he begins this conflict as the
‘‘Name-of-the-Father’’ (Écrits 199); the child is thus in conflict
with the Symbolic Order, that is, the phallic signifier, language.2
The crucial action for the child, then, is to somehow eliminate the
threat of the symbolic father, ‘‘thus showing that if this murder is
the fruitful moment of debt through which the subject binds him-
self for life to the Law, the symbolic Father is, in so far as he
signifies this Law, the dead Father’’ (Écrits 199). Without going
into the nuances of psychosis that Lacan explores or the nuances
of gender that he fails to explore, I would like to point out that
this principle demonstrates a major convention at work in novels
about adolescence: regardless of whether the adolescent has an
actual parent figure to rebel against (or, in more Oedipal terms, to
symbolically murder), the child must create for her- or himself a
parent figure, a symbolic parent, to murder.3
Three different situations lead to three different sets of Oedipal
struggle (as I loosely call the struggle of the adolescent against
the parent that seems to be a rebellion permeating the genre of
the adolescent novel). The first of these is the involvement of the
actual parent in the adolescent’s development, as in Little Women
(1868, 1869), Seventeenth Summer, or M. C. Higgins, the Great (1974).
The second is the involvement of a parent figure in loco parentis, as
in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) or The Outsiders. The non-
involvement of an actual parent can create a third type of adoles-
cent fiction wherein the adolescent creates a parent of words, in
logos parentis, as in Jean Webster’s Daddy-Long-Legs and Virginia
Hamilton’s The Planet of Junior Brown. I recognize that this phrase I
have coined, ‘‘in logos parentis,’’ is a violent yoking together of het-
erogeneous languages, but it is nonetheless useful to the point I

wish to make.
In Parentis
One of the most frequently commented on features of the

prototype of female adolescent literature, Louisa May Alcott’s
Little Women, is the novel’s involved parents, especially Marmee.4
Marmee works diligently to help her daughters become socially
indoctrinated ‘‘little women.’’ She tells the two eldest, Meg and Jo:
‘‘I want my daughters to be beautiful, accomplished, and good; to
be admired, loved and respected; to have a happy youth, to be
well and wisely married, and to lead useful, pleasant lives, with as
little care and sorrow to try them as God sees fit to send. To be
loved and chosen by a good man is the best and sweetest thing
which can happen to a woman; and I sincerely hope my girls may
know this beautiful experience’’ (89). Toward that end, Marmee is
closely involved in her daughters’ growth. She gains a particularly
strong authoritative presence in Jo’s life when she tries to help Jo
obliterate her expressions of anger. Jo’s father, too, is critical of
and involved in Jo’s suppression of her temper. Jo gives her par-
ents the most authority she grants them in the entire text when
she agrees with their combined agenda to repress her temper. Jo’s
subsequent rebellion against her parents is very short-lived: she
writes lurid potboilers only until she is corrected by the well-
meaning Professor Bhaer, acting in loco parentis, whom she even-
tually marries. Jo ultimately grows up to be exactly what her
parents have wanted her to be all along: a self-eviscerated ma-
tron serving the patriarchy.5 Although Jo may act out the father-
daughter fantasy that Madelon Bedell cites as the defining pattern
of the Alcott canon, Jo never does quite manage to rebel against
her mother (241–242). As Elizabeth Keyser notes, ‘‘Marmee
keeps her daughters dependent, undeveloped, diminutive’’ by
teaching them to repress their own desires (69). Marmee, and to a
lesser degree, Mr. March, serves as the source of narrative author-
ity designed to repress an adolescent’s power.
If Little Women is a prototypical nineteenth-century novel of fe-
male adolescence, Maureen Daly’s Seventeenth Summer could be
called the twentieth-century prototype.6 As with Jo, Angie’s

mother is more present in her life than her father is, for as a trav-
eling salesman, he is gone during the week. As with Jo, Angie’s
rebellion against her bourgeois parents (in this case, staged when
she dates a boy from the working-class — gasp!) is short-lived.
Angie ends up doing exactly what her parents wanted her to do
all along: she breaks up with Jack and goes to college. Angie’s
parents barely figure in the plot of the novel; they are present in
relatively few scenes. But as Angie internalizes their values and
acts on their wishes, she demonstrates a self-repression of which
they clearly approve. Based on Seventeenth Summer and Little Women,
it would seem, then, that in classic novels of adolescent female
development, the Oedipal stage is short-lived for the female
protagonist.7
The pattern for males is a bit different, for their rebellions seem
to gain them some degree of autonomy that females whose par-
ents are present in their lives have traditionally been denied.8 Vir-
ginia Hamilton’s M. C. Higgins, the Great is the story of a boy’s
efforts to reform his stubborn father. M. C. recognizes that the
waste from the strip-mining above their family’s land on Sara’s
Mountain is about to destroy their home. The boy tries to con-
vince his father, Jones, to move away from the land, but he is
unsuccessful. The tension with his father is demonstrated by their
swimming competition; when M. C. can finally swim the Ohio
River, Jones rewards his son with a phallic forty-foot flagpole on
which M. C. perches. The tension between them becomes pal-
pable when M. C. befriends a boy that his father has prohibited
him from seeing because of intraracial racism. Based on what he
learns from this forbidden family, M. C. comes to realize that his
father will never leave the land, so the boy decides to build a wall
to protect his family from the strip-mining waste. And his rebel-
lion pays off, for his father helps build the wall, contributing
gravestones from the family graveyard that are symbolic of the
family’s heritage. Through his rebellion, M. C. has gained his fa-
ther’s respect. M. C. learns to share some measure of authority
with his father. Male protagonists experience a similar pattern of
conflict transformed into cooperation in Laurence Yep’s Dragon-
wings, Chris Crutcher’s Running Loose (1983), and Jacqueline Wood-
son’s From the Notebooks of Melanin Sun (1995).9 Adolescent charac-
ters whose power is sanctioned by their parents are usually male,

and they are far more likely to share authority with their parents
than they are to usurp it altogether.
In Loco Parentis
The substitute parent as a presence against which the adoles-

cent can react is at least as old a convention as Clemens’s Adven-
tures of Huckleberry Finn. It is a critical commonplace to say that
Jim is a surrogate father who replaces the inadequate Pap and
gives Huck the parenting he has always needed; Aidan Chambers
actually identifies Jim as being ‘‘in loco parentis to Huck’’ (‘‘All of a
Tremble’’ 203). In fact, in identifying the homoerotic archetype
at work in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Leslie Fiedler casts Jim
in the role of father figure in Huck’s Oedipal crisis. But as with
an actual parent, Huck must rebel against this in loco parentis fig-
ure before he can grow. Huck treats Jim with disrespect, fooling
him about the fog on the river, until Jim teaches him that treat-
ing a loved one that way is ‘‘trash’’ (90). Huck must wrestle with
his conscience about whether to sell out his father figure in a clas-
sically Oedipal maneuver: what better way to rid oneself of an
authority figure than to sell him back into slavery? Luckily for
Jim — and for Huck’s sense of self — Huck ultimately changes
his intentions, but the ultimate authority of the text still resides
with Jim. It is he who carries the epistemological truth that enables
the text’s resolution: Huck’s father figure tells him that his actual
father is dead.
Ponyboy Curtis’s rebellion against an in loco parentis figure in
S. E. Hinton’s The Outsiders is even more clear-cut. Ponyboy’s
brother, Daryl, has been his legal guardian since the death of their
parents. Out of fear and insecurity, Daryl is verbally abusive to his
brother because he knows no other way to control him. Ponyboy,
interpreting this abusiveness as a lack of love, rebels against his
brother’s overstated authority. Pony cannot grow to maturity until
he can understand his brother’s strictness as an act of love; in
other words, he cannot mature until he accepts and forgives his
symbolic father figure. From this point in the novel, the two are
capable of sharing authority. In Ursula K. LeGuin’s A Wizard of
Earthsea (1968), Ged rebels against the wizard who has trained
him before he learns how to use power appropriately. Dicey Til-
lerman has a similar experience with her grandmother in Cynthia
Voigt’s The Homecoming (1981) and Dicey’s Song (1982): she rebels
against Gram before the two decide to share the authority of rais-
ing the younger Tillerman children together. Thus, even if the pa-
rental figures are surrogates rather than actual, it seems that ado-
lescents must rebel against them in order to grow.
In Logos Parentis
What really strikes me as odd, however, is the propensity of

adolescents with neither actual nor effective surrogate parents to
create imaginary parents against whom to rebel in a classic re-
enactment of the Lacanian principle of creating the Name-of-the-
Father. After all, it would seem that the parentless adolescent is
the most free, that being parentless is the most desirable imagin-
able state of adolescent wish fulfillment. Why would the adoles-
cent create a parent to make trouble for him- or herself ? Lacan
might answer that the adolescent does so because the idea of the
parent is so seductive, so central to the subject’s sense of self-
definition, that the process becomes inevitable:
How can the Name-of-the-Father be called by the subject to
the only place in which it could have reached him and in which
it has never been? Simply by a real father, not necessarily by the
subject’s own father, but by A-father.
Again, this A-father must attain that place to which the
subject was unable to call him before. It is enough that this
A-father should be situated in a third position in some relation
based on the imaginary dyad, . . . ego-object or reality-ideal, that
interests the subject in the field of eroticized aggression that it
induces. (Écrits 217)
The most classic example of an adolescent who invents a par-
ent out of words, an ‘‘A-father,’’ to rebel against in what becomes
an act of eroticized aggression is Judy Abbott, the protagonist of
Jean Webster’s epistolary Bildungsroman, Daddy-Long-Legs. The poli-
tics of authority are intricate and insidious in Daddy-Long-Legs.
Rescued from an orphanage by one of the institution’s trustees

who prefers to remain nameless, Judy attends college funded by
her patron’s beneficence. One condition her benefactor stipulates
is that she write him a letter once a month: ‘‘Just such a letter as
you would write to your parents if they were living’’ (16); the sec-
ond condition crucial to Judy’s rebellion is the benefactor’s refusal
to name himself. Because Judy does not know her benefactor or
understand his motives, she attributes almost godlike authority to
this anonymous man.
Although Judy’s letters are supposed to be written to ‘‘Mr. John
Smith,’’ her first attempt to reject her benefactor’s authority is to
refuse this epithet: ‘‘ Why couldn’t you have picked out a name
with a little personality? I might as well write letters to Dear
Hitching-Post or Dear Clothes-Pole’’ (21). Both of the suggested
names she dismisses are phallic. Because she has seen his shadow
on the wall as he left the orphanage, she knows he is tall. She
decides to address him as ‘‘Daddy-Long-Legs,’’ another phallic
name which comfortably evokes for her the parentage she seeks
and which sets up an Oedipal tension for the reader to observe.
Judy tells Daddy-Long-Legs: ‘‘I have been thinking about you a
great deal this summer; having somebody take an interest in me
after all these years, makes me feel as though I had found a sort
of family. It seems as though I belonged to somebody now, and
it’s a very comfortable sensation’’ (21).
Judy then goes on to make up attributes she ascribes to Daddy-
Long-Legs. For example, she decides what he looks like:
I have it planned exactly what you look like — very satisfacto-
rily — until I reach the top of your head, and then I am stuck.
I can’t decide whether you have white hair or black hair or sort
of sprinkly gray hair or maybe none at all. . . . Would you like
to know what color your eyes are? They’re gray and your eye-
brows stick out like a porch roof . . . and your mouth is a
straight line with a tendency to turn down at the corners. Oh,
you see, I know! You’re a snappy old thing with a temper. (35)
In point of fact, Daddy-Long-Legs is nowhere near as old as she
thinks; he is Jarvis Pendleton, the forty-year-old uncle of one of
her roommates, who is ‘‘tall and thinnish with a dark face all over
lines, and the funniest underneath smile that never quite comes
through but just wrinkles up the corners of his mouth. And he

has a way of making you feel right off as though you’d known him
a long time. He’s very companionable’’ (59). Judy does not dis-
cover the identity of Daddy-Long-Legs or his sexual interest in
her until the final scene of the novel. That Jarvis has knowledge
Judy does not gives him power over her in a situation in which
shared authority is impossible.
Over and over, Judy rebels against the lack of knowledge she
has about her benefactor. Lying beneath her peevishness is a feel-
ing of the disproportionate power in her situation; she seeks in-
formation about him to equalize the imbalance that comes from
his knowing everything about her and her knowing nothing about
him. The power imbalance exists entirely within the Symbolic Or-
der, for Judy knows that although she is actual to him, he can
never be more than symbolic for her.10 She writes:
Sir: You never answer any questions; you never show the
slightest interest in anything I do. You are probably the horrid-
est one of all those horrid trustees, and the reason you are edu-
cating me is, not because you care a bit about me, but from a
sense of duty. I don’t know a single thing about you. I don’t
even know your name. It is very uninspiring writing to a thing.
I haven’t a doubt but that you throw my letters into the waste-
basket without reading them. (47)
Daddy-Long-Legs does, however, read her letters, as he makes
clear after she writes that she plans to spend the summer with her
roommate, Sallie McBride, and her family. Judy has made no
bones about enjoying the attention Sallie’s brother Jimmie has
paid her, so she is hurt and angry when her benefactor’s secretary
writes forbidding her to go to the McBrides’. Judy cannot know
what the reader eventually ascertains — that Pendleton must be
jealous of McBride — so she rebels by refusing to write to him
for a while in the summer. Since he exists as a symbolic figure only
when she writes to him and since she is rebelling against his efforts
to sublimate her sexuality, he is effectively dead for the duration
of her silence, temporarily killed by her aggression. When she
resumes her correspondence and resuscitates this symbolic father,
she tells him, ‘‘It has been nearly two months since I wrote, which
wasn’t nice of me, I know, but I haven’t loved you much this sum-
mer — you see I’m being frank’’ (108). If readers have discerned
that Daddy-Long-Legs is Jarvis Pendleton, they may recognize
that some of Judy’s frustration is sexualized; readers with that per-
ception understand that the figure Judy thinks she loves filially is
entirely fabricated. As such, Daddy-Long-Legs is a construct of
the Symbolic Order.
Judy rebels against Daddy-Long-Legs again the following sum-
mer when he offers to send her to Europe. She insists, instead,
that she should work tutoring to earn money for herself. Jarvis
Pendleton — for whom she is developing feelings perhaps more
legitimate than the gratitude-blown-into-love she feels for Daddy-
Long-Legs — has also pressured her to go to Europe. Judy writes
to her benefactor in language with a subtly sexual undertone: if
Jarvis ‘‘hadn’t been so dictatorial, maybe I should have entirely
weakened. I can be enticed step by step, but I won’t be forced’’
(150). Judy’s sense of rebelliousness is well developed; thus, it is
no surprise that later in the summer she joins the McBrides at their
summer camp without consulting Daddy-Long-Legs. Although
Pendleton is performing in loco parentis and Judy rebels against it,
her more significant rebellion is against the parent she has created
symbolically, in logos parentis.
The novel takes its most ironic turn in the final pages when
Judy discovers that Jarvis Pendleton has been her benefactor all
along. The passage is ironic — unintentionally so, which thus
leaves the novel an easy mark for deconstruction — because for
once Judy, who has been so independent, so assertive, and so re-
bellious throughout the entire novel, does not utter a single word
of protest that Pendleton has deceived her, possibly even manipu-
lating her Pygmalion-style to create the perfect little wife for him-
self. Instead, she meekly puts her hand in his as he ‘‘laughed and
held out [his] hand and said, ‘Dear little Judy, couldn’t you guess
that I was Daddy-Long-Legs?’ ’’ (186).
As it turns out, Judy has had a surrogate parent in loco parentis
against whom to rebel throughout the course of the novel, but
because she has not known that, because her understanding of her
parent figure has been something she has constructed out of the
Symbolic Order to meet her own needs, the novel fits the para-
digm of the in logos parentis narrative: Daddy-Long-Legs is a parent
in name and word only. And Judy successfully completes the
growth to adulthood that the bildungsroman pattern demands be-

cause she has had this parent figure made of words against whom
to rebel. She has empowered herself by rebelling against a parental
authority figure.
In The Planet of Junior Brown by Virginia Hamilton, Junior Brown
has much the same experience of creating a parent out of words.
Unlike Judy, he does have one actual parent present in his life, the
overbearing and neurotic Junella Brown. Her presence as the re-
pressive parent in Junior’s story underscores the triadic pattern
Lacan considers central to the Oedipal struggle: the son’s struggle
grows out of ‘‘dependence on [his mother’s] love . . . the desire
for her desire’’ situated against the ‘‘phallocentric’’ parent blocking
this desire (Écrits 198). Junior Brown would like to make his
mother happy, but Mrs. Brown is so authoritative that she has
effectively silenced her son: although he is a virtuoso pianist, she
has removed the strings from his piano. She has ‘‘tak[en] away his
sound from him’’ so that ‘‘she has her peace and quiet’’ (118 –119).
And just as Mrs. Brown has silenced Junior’s aural art, she silences
(or darkens) his visual art by taking his paints away from him and
destroying his masterpiece when she does not like what he has
painted. Junior’s pre-Oedipal desire for imaginary oneness with
his mother is clearly impossible.11
Junior, who weighs over three hundred pounds, misses his fa-
ther. The man’s absence rather than his presence seems to be the
chief obstacle in Junior’s relationship with his mother because
Mrs. Brown seems incapable of happiness with her husband gone.
As a result of Junior’s misguided goals for happiness, he seems to
have no existence of his own; his very name makes him a lesser
parallel to, a shadow of, his absent father. Whether to counter-
balance his unexpressed rage at his mother or simply out of long-
ing, Junior describes the existence of a father in a way that makes
the man seem tangible. But a close reading of the text reveals the
possibility that Mr. Brown is, like Daddy-Long-Legs, in logos paren-
tis, a parent constructed of words by an adolescent who needs to
believe in this invented figure.
Early in the narrative, Junior’s friend Buddy thinks about in-
formation Junior has given him: ‘‘Junior Brown’s mother was as
out of her head anxious as all the other women in the neighbor-
hood whose husbands had gone away. Only, Junior’s father had a
good job over in Jersey’’ (25). The euphemism for the men who
have abandoned their families coupled with the euphemism for
Mrs. Brown’s neuroses establishes the possibility that the text is
not being entirely honest here. Since the information comes to
the reader through Junior’s best friend’s impression of Junior’s
interpretation, the possibility of distorted facts seems even more
likely.
More possibilities of textual misleading arise later in the narra-
tive: ‘‘On Saturday morning Walter Brown didn’t stand there at
the threshold of Junior’s room. Half asleep, Junior knew his father
wasn’t there. ‘Daddy,’ he said because he wanted to’’ (104). Even
before he is conscious, Junior is aware of his father’s absence.
Then Junior demonstrates his ability to fabricate his father’s pres-
ence with his apostrophic evocation of his father’s name. The text
continues: ‘‘His father might have come in the room wearing his
robe and slippers and freshly creased slacks. He always did come
in to Junior in a warm, respectful manner, as if Junior’s room were
the chapel he had known all his life’’ (104). In Junior’s mind, his
father is dressed like a priest and his room is the temple; the boy
himself becomes the god about to be worshiped by the robed
man. Junior needs this vision of his father to offset the denigration
he suffers at his mother’s hands. And then Junior says out loud in
a ‘‘voice . . . husky with feeling’’: ‘‘Daddy . . . I haven’t seen you
on a Saturday morning in forever’’ (104). The statement could be
literally true; perhaps Junior has never met his father. Junior’s
knowledge about his father is a power the boy does not want. He
exists in denial rather than proclaim his father absent.
Junior’s friend Buddy Clark provides a foil for his father-
lessness; Buddy, too, is fatherless (and also motherless) in a
much more visible way than Junior is. Buddy is a homeless child
who scarcely remembers his parents. He has learned to be self-
sufficient and how to help other children in similar circumstances.
Buddy has two adult mentors: the newspaper vendor for whom
he works and the janitor at the school who helps both Buddy and
Junior hide in the school basement so that they will not have to
face the madding crowd at their public school. As Junior is an
artistic genius, Buddy is a mathematical genius, so neither of them
conforms to the community in which they are forced to exist. The
janitor, Mr. Pool, helps them construct a solar system in the base-
ment, and Buddy surprises Junior by building a tenth planet for

the system and naming it ‘‘the planet of Junior Brown.’’ But Ju-
nior, unsure how to accept love from these friends, thinks they
are making fun of him.
Buddy is able to grow during the course of the novel because
of the help of the two men who function for him in loco parentis.
Of Mr. Pool, Buddy thinks, ‘‘If he could have a father, he would
have only this man’’ (166). Yet Buddy temporarily rebels against
Pool when the janitor interferes with the boy’s plan for helping
Junior run away. Junior has been driven to the brink of insanity by
his mother’s repression. After his mother has destroyed Junior’s
painting, he decides to run away, rejecting her and rebelling against
his hope of his father’s return. The fantasy that his father will
come rescue him on Saturday no longer seems enough to sustain
the boy; this breakdown of the Symbolic Order appears to be
leading Junior into the type of psychosis that Lacan describes
(Écrits 192–201). Junior’s emotional vulnerability is further exac-
erbated by the schizophrenia of his piano teacher, Miss Peebs.
Trying to help his teacher, Junior tells Miss Peebs he will take ‘‘the
relative’’ who has been plaguing her away. But ‘‘the relative’’ is a
figment of Miss Peebs’s paranoid imagination. In order to rid her
of it, Junior takes ‘‘the relative’’ on as his own personal paranoid
delusion. He has again constructed another male relative in his
own mind to authorize a mother figure’s happiness.
Mr. Pool thinks that Buddy should turn Junior over to the au-
thorities, but Buddy thinks that to do so would make Junior cra-
zier, so Buddy decides instead to take his friend to the ‘‘planet’’ in
the basement of an abandoned building where he and other
homeless boys have built a hideout. After rebelling against his fa-
ther in loco parentis, Buddy has the greatest moment of growth of
any character in the novel. He remembers that the boy who taught
him how to survive on the streets taught him not that ‘‘the highest
law is to learn to live for yourself’’ as he has inaccurately remem-
bered (74), but that ‘‘ We are together . . . because we have to learn
to live for each other’’ (217). Once Buddy understands the fun-
damental importance of community in his life, his whole life
changes for the better. This knowledge of communal power gives
Buddy tremendous authority within his own community.
Junior, however, is isolated from the father that represents for
him a sense of community, so the boy trembles on the edge of

insanity. Buddy has an epiphany in which he recognizes that Ju-
nior’s father is in logos parentis when he tells Mr. Pool that maybe
they could hide Junior until his father gets home: ‘‘Buddy smiled.
‘Maybe not,’ he said. ‘I figure his daddy won’t make it home this
week either’ ’’ (195). Even if there really is a Mr. Walter Brown
living and working in New Jersey, for his son the man is nothing
more than a fantasy, a verbal creation of the Symbolic Order with
more reality in Junior’s mind than in Junior’s life.
At the end of The Planet of Junior Brown, it seems that Junior is
beginning to heal. ‘‘The relative. . . . became less clear to Junior
and somewhat fuzzy around his shoulder. The thing seemed to
disappear part way into the wall’’ (217). The diminution of this
mental construct of a male relative seems to fade in direct corre-
lation to the nurturing Junior is getting from Buddy. Junior is able
to begin murdering the fantasy-based relative because Buddy has
provided him with an alternative to the destructive Oedipal triad
of his home life. But although the possibility of Junior’s growth is
left ambivalent, Buddy’s growth is clear; his development posi-
tions this novel as an Entwicklungsroman. He has grown because he
has had surrogate father figures against which to rebel, and now
he is free to be a father in loco parentis for the boys of his planet
and Junior.
Two novels about girls placed in foster care after their mothers
have abandoned them also delineate the creation and eventual
abandonment of a parent figure created in logos parentis. In Kath-
erine Paterson’s The Great Gilly Hopkins (1978), Gilly constructs a
mental image of her mother based on two postcards the woman
has sent her proclaiming her love. Gilly rebels against her foster
mother — a woman who acts in loco parentis — and gains for her-
self the power to move in with her grandmother. But when Gilly
finally meets her mother, she is disappointed to discover that her
biological mother does not love her. Gilly realizes that she has
rejected the love of a genuine parent figure and that the rebellion
she thought was liberating has in fact disempowered her. Her rec-
ognition of the power of the Symbolic Order is shattering, but she
is at least able to murder her own construct, the mother she has
made out of words, and go on with her life. The protagonist of To
All My Fans, with Love, from Sylvie (1982), by Ellen Conford, is less
self-aware about the implications of creating a parent for herself

out of the Symbolic Order. Sylvie writes three letters to the
mother she has never met during the process of running away
from her foster father, who is sexually abusing her. When Sylvie
returns into protective custody at the end of the novel, she has
not recognized the role of language in her own self-delusions. She
neither rebels against nor murders the in logos parentis figure she has
constructed. As a result, Sylvie ultimately seems even more re-
pressed than Gilly does.
In Lacanian terms, then, it is no mystery why an adolescent
would construct a parent to murder out of the Symbolic Order:
the child must come to terms with the Symbolic Order as a nec-
essary precondition to understanding herself as a subject con-
structed of language. S/he must do battle with the Symbolic Or-
der over the phallocentric obstacle to her/his desire in order to
become an actualized subject (Lacan, Écrits 219–221). Inherently
misogynistic and homophobic as some of Lacan’s precepts are,
they offer a unique way to read adolescent literature, for surely in
fictional narratives even more than in ‘‘real life’’ (whatever that is)
the construction of the Symbolic Order serves as a linguistic tool
for analyzing the construction of the text. It is important to note
that in all cases under discussion here, the adults who write these
fictions have defined linguistic rebellion as essential to adoles-
cents’ empowerment. Such a message carries strong ideological
implications.
Ideology and Textual Authority
Since the characters constructing parents against whom to

rebel are themselves the constructs of adults who exist outside of
the text, ya novels serve both to reflect and to perpetuate the
cultural mandate that teenagers rebel against their parents. So de-
fined, the power dynamic between adolescents and adults is al-
ways already one of contested authority. But if ya novels are writ-
ten even in small part to remind teenagers of their role in the site
of contested authority, then issues of authority have ideological
implications that bear further investigation. Such novels as Salin-
ger’s The Catcher in the Rye, Hinton’s The Outsiders, Hamilton’s Arilla
Sun Down, and Crutcher’s Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes convey their
ideologies about authority through their narrative structure.
How a text expresses its ideology is a function of narrative
structure. The level at which the ideology occurs affects the
reader’s perception of it. Peter Hollindale distinguishes explicit
textual ideology from implicit textual ideology by asking us to in-
vestigate the messages the author intends to communicate in con-
junction with those s/he communicates passively as ‘‘unexamined
assumptions’’ (Hollindale, ‘‘Ideology’’ 10 –15).12 Hollindale does
not clarify the obvious point that a text can communicate its ex-
plicit ideology either directly or indirectly: directly if the ideology
is actually stated in the book; indirectly if the ideology is implied
for the reader to infer. The distinction between explicit ideologies
that the text directly articulates versus those that it only implies
has repercussions for the power relationship that the text estab-
lishes with the reader. Unstated explicit ideologies left as infer-
ences for adolescent readers to draw imply a different set of power
differentials between the text and readers than explicit ideologies
stated directly for readers’ benefit. Indirect ideologies may, for ex-
ample, imply that the reader has more knowledge or more capa-
bility to draw inferences than narratives that rely on directly stated
ideologies.
The power dynamic also shifts if the ideological voice is stated
by an adult voice rather than an adolescent voice. Some narratives
that rely exclusively on adult voices to articulate direct ideologies
may offer fewer affirmations of adolescents than texts that allow
adolescents to have the power/knowledge necessary to engage
with ideological statements. James Bennett’s I Can Hear the Mourn-
ing Dove (1990), for example, is the story of two emotionally dis-
turbed teenagers who help each other. They gain insights from
each other rather than from some sort of omniscient adult. The
ideology affirms teenagers’ power, especially when it functions in
community.13 In order to better understand how such ideologies
are communicated to readers, we can employ the strategies of-
fered by narrative theory about the effect of narrative position and
the relative involvement of a character in the role of narration.
Narrative position affects the power dynamics involved in ideo-
logical communications within adolescent literature.
Gérard Genette has codified ways of investigating narrative po-
sition. His classification of various types of narrators demon-

strates that the information to which narrators have access affects
both the structure of a narrative and the narrator’s role in the
actual plot. In other words, textual knowledge empowers narra-
tors. For example, a first-person narrator like Huckleberry Finn
can only report on events to which he has epistemological access:
he can only describe what he knows. Omniscient narrators like
the narrative persona of The Chocolate War have access to more
knowledge and therefore, arguably, access to more power than do
first-person narrators like Huck Finn.14 Far more important than
how much information the narrator has is the issue surrounding
how that information is used. Does the narrator use information
to lead the reader to draw conclusions as Huck Finn does? Or
does the narrator withhold information from readers that disables
their deductive capabilities as occurs in I Am the Cheese? The
knowledge a narrator has translates into various manifestations
of power, depending on how the narrator shares that informa-
tion with readers. Moreover, in adolescent literature, the power/
knowledge dynamic often underscores the didactic impulse of the
narrative such that the narrative structure becomes tied to the em-
powerment/repression dynamic that permeates the genre. Many
of the first-person confessional narrators of the 1970s problem
novel, for example, cannot resist the urge to tell the reader what
they have learned. Mark’s direct commentary to the reader about
moral ambiguity in the last paragraph of S. E. Hinton’s That Was
Then, This Is Now (1971) comes to mind as one example: ‘‘I am too
mixed up to really care. And to think, I used to be sure of things.
Me, once I had all the answers. I wish I was a kid again, when I
had all the answers’’ (154). Hinton makes sure that the reader
knows Mark has learned that moral absolutes are difficult to de-
fine. In this case, the narrator can be thought of as having power
over readers because he is transmitting to them information that
they may not have previously had.
Genette’s codification of narrative position is helpful in de-
scribing such relationships between the narrator and readers. He
defines ‘‘author-narrators,’’ those with a concept of the entire nar-
rative structure, as ‘‘extradiegetic’’ narrators (229). Extradiegetic
narrators are those who have a connection to the ‘‘public’’ in the
way that they address their story to a reader who exists outside of
their own story. Huckleberry Finn or the third-person narrator of

The Chocolate War are extradiegetic narrators. They both have direct
relationships with the reader of the narrative; both share their
power/knowledge directly as the narrative unfolds. Interior nar-
rators, on the other hand, are those with knowledge of only a
portion of the narration; Genette calls them ‘‘intradiegetic’’ nar-
rators (229). Intradiegetic narrators are interior narrators, charac-
ters who have knowledge of only a portion of the narrative.15 As
such, they have a direct relationship with their listening audience
within the text but an indirect relationship with the actual reader
of the text. Mr. Antolini, for instance, is an intradiegetic narrator
in The Catcher in the Rye when he talks to Holden Caulfield about
the difference between maturity and immaturity near the end of
the novel. When Johnny writes Ponyboy a letter in The Outsiders
telling his friend to keep being ‘‘gold’’ (154), Johnny becomes an
intradiegetic narrator. He has a direct relationship with Ponyboy,
just as Mr. Antolini does with Holden. But the reader of the book
experiences Johnny’s and Mr. Antolini’s rhetoric through the filter
of the extradiegetic narrator. Both The Outsiders and The Catcher in
the Rye demonstrate how a narrator’s relationship to the informa-
tion in the text dictates the level of power s/he has: Ponyboy has
more narrative authority and power than Johnny does, just as
Holden has more narrative authority and power than Mr. Antolini
does. Ponyboy and Holden control the reader in ways that Johnny
and Mr. Antolini cannot.
Seymour Chatman’s basic model of narrative structure proves
useful here. The transmission process between author and reader
moves through several levels of communication. Those in the box
represent the text; the elements in parentheses Chatman identifies
as fictive elements that are optional (151).
Narrative Text
Real author → Implied author → (Narrator) → (Narratee) → Implied reader → Real Reader
Maria Nikolajeva analyzes this process at work in Aidan Cham-

bers’s novel Breaktime (1978). Chambers is the real author, Ditto is
the implied author and the narrator of the text about his relation-
ship with his father and his romance with Helen that constitutes
the text of Breaktime. Ditto tells his story to his school chum Mor-
gan, who serves as the narratee within the actual narration (Ni-
kolajeva 195). The book then constructs an implied reader with its
cultural references: the audience is meant to be white, middle-
class, British, male, and adolescent. When I read the book, I am
the real reader who may temporarily adopt the characteristics of
the implied reader.
How a text expresses its ideology affects the construction of
the implied reader. Most ya novels assume, for example, that the
implied reader is adolescent. American ya novels tend to assume
an American audience; novels by white Americans often assume
a white audience. The implied reader of The Outsiders is one such
case: the implied reader of that novel is a white American adoles-
cent. With the assumptions that any text makes about what its
reader knows, every text positions the implied reader in multiple
subject positions.
A crisis in reading adolescent literature occurs, however, when
the actual reader is displaced, when the subject position of the
actual reader is violated.16 Adult readers of ya novels accept the
contract of reading outside their subject position when they pick
up a ya novel. They know before they begin that they are reading
against their subject position as an adult. Adolescent readers, how-
ever, might not expect their subject positions to be so violated,
although female readers have so often been trained to read as male
readers and black readers have so often been trained to read as
white readers that they may not be uncomfortable with the dis-
juncture that necessarily occurs.17 The relationship between the
narrator and the implied reader often proves to be the crucible in
which ideology is smelted in adolescent literature because the
source of narrative authority in a text can reflect much about the
text’s ideology. Of special interest is the age of didactic characters
who carry an adolescent text’s ideology.
Most adolescent literature bears some sort of didactic impulse.
In a literature often about growth, it is the rare author who can
resist the impulse to moralize about how people grow. Adolescent
literature is, therefore, rife with didactic explicit ideologies, how-
ever obliquely they may be worded.18 The Outsiders is none too
subtle in its message that class strife is both destructive and inevi-
table: the refrain ‘‘things are rough all over’’ (33, 103) echoes
through the book. The Catcher in the Rye contains perhaps more
subtle explicit ideologies, at least one of which is voiced by
Holden’s teacher, Mr. Antolini, when he quotes, ‘‘The mark of the

immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the
mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one’’
(188). In this case, an intradiegetic narrator voices the didactic ide-
ology. The intradiegetic narrator is fairly removed from the nar-
rative action and knowledge of the rest of the plot; it is Holden
who knows what has happened in The Catcher in the Rye. But it is
Mr. Antolini who knows what is happening — both to Holden
emotionally and in the larger sense of what is happening to strug-
gling adolescents in general. Mr. Antolini is serving in loco parentis
to Holden. When Antolini becomes an authority figure, Holden’s
knowledge becomes at least temporarily displaced by Mr. Anto-
lini’s. In classic Freudian fashion, Holden rejects his father figure’s
advice, but the astute reader can recognize that it is the adult who
is the wise one here. Holden, for all his rebellious ways respected
by iconoclasts for decades, is not as smart as he thinks he is. In
other words, Holden’s narrative authority is undercut by the au-
thority of an adult. The Catcher in the Rye assumes on one level a
sympathetic audience, a reader who shares the narrator’s aware-
ness of high school politics and his prurient interest in sex. On
that level, the implied reader of The Catcher in the Rye is an adoles-
cent. This accommodation of an adolescent reader provides one
explanation for the text’s appeal to teenage readers. Yet when an
adult assumes narrative authority within the text for the purposes
of communicating an ideology of maturity, the adolescent implied
reader is at least temporarily displaced.
The pattern is not altogether uncommon in adolescent litera-
ture. In Chris Crutcher’s novels, wise therapists like the intra-
diegetic narrator Mr. Nak in Ironman (1995) dispense wisdom for
the emotionally shattered characters in the novel, including the
extradiegetic narrator, teenage athlete Bo Brewster. When Mr.
Nak communicates in loco parentis with an air of authority about
how Bo can manage his anger, Nak is an adult narrator tempo-
rarily displacing the adolescent implied reader. In Angela John-
son’s Toning the Sweep (1993), the extradiegetic narrator’s grand-
mother, Ola, teaches her to accept death in a passage in which she
takes on the role of intradiegetic narrator (88 –90). Ola concludes
that her granddaughter must be allowed to take risks in order to
live. The imagery is very similar to Holden’s epiphany in The
Catcher in the Rye when he decides to let his sister reach for the
brass ring on a carousel: ‘‘The thing with kids is, if they want to
grab for the gold ring, you have to let them do it, and not say
anything. If they fall off, they fall off, but it’s bad if you say any-
thing to them’’ (211). This passage contains the key to Holden’s
growth: he must accept change. But he achieves his epiphany only
after he has heard Mr. Antolini’s message about risk taking. At
least temporarily, all of these characters lose narrative power to
alternate narrators who usurp their authority within the text for a
time. It is as if these characters and the implied readers they are
addressing must lose authority for a while to an adult, usually a
parent figure, to gain personal power by the end of the narrative.
Virginia Hamilton’s Arilla Sun Down offers one more layer of
complexity to this model because she adds questions about the
nature of social construction to this novel’s ideological discourses.
On the surface, Hamilton’s Arilla Sun Down is a novel about sibling
rivalry. Arilla Adams and her older brother, Jack Sun Run Adams,
are the children of an African American mother and a Native
American father. Arilla and her brother are engaged in a continual
power struggle. She spends most of her life thinking her brother
wishes her dead because his actions toward her range from the
negligent to the malicious. But Jack’s antipathy is only part of why
Arilla feels excluded from both her family and her community.
For one thing, the other children in town are not sure what to
make of her because few of them come from homes as happy or
as privileged as hers. For another, they are not sure what to make
of her race. One child even exclaims, ‘‘I didn’t know they was for-
real Indian. . . . I thought they was just passing’’ (67). Hamilton
problematizes the spectrum of race quite intricately in this novel;
she acknowledges not only interracial tension, but intraracial ten-
sions among African Americans who call Arilla ‘‘light-skinned. . . .
because even now they can’t bring themselves to say black out
loud, since they already spent so much time hating the word and
what it stood for’’ (30). These same people also view Arilla’s Hai-
tian girlfriend critically. Arilla must learn how to negotiate a posi-
tion for herself within this race-conscious community, and she
learns that skin color certainly affects social power in her culture.
Arilla also feels keenly her difference from the rest of her fam-
ily. She wishes she had the charisma her parents and brother have
(42, 49) and asks, ‘‘ Who am I? Why do I have to be the ugly one?’’
(114). Jack exacerbates Arilla’s sense of exclusion by claiming only
his Amerind heritage, as he prefers to think of himself, and by
denying that she is of ‘‘The People,’’ as their father would say (20).
Jack Sun Run derisively calls her ‘‘Moon’’ to assert his masculine
dominance over her and identifies her as black because she looks
more like their mother than he does. In thus rejecting his own
black heritage (and his mother), Jack implies that being Native
American (and male) is preferable to being African American (and
female). As long as Arilla accepts the position Jack assigns her of
being out of touch with her Amerind identity, she feels powerless.
But Arilla eventually learns that he is wrong on several counts:
first, she is as much a ‘‘blood’’ as he is, just as he is as black as she
is, and second, neither race is better than the other; they both just
are. In making this decision, she quits rejecting both her mother
and her father and embraces the support they have to offer her.
Finally, Arilla learns that she is as strong as Jack is, regardless of
their genders.
Arilla comes to her questioning of her racial identity while she
is writing her autobiography for a school assignment. Although
the assignment seems to play only a small part in the story, its
metaphorical value turns out to be enormous, for Arilla’s primary
identity formation centers around her burgeoning awareness of
the Symbolic Order as she comes to define herself as a storyteller.
This self-consciousness about storytelling foregrounds discursive
practices in the text because Arilla can only come into her own
as a writer when she explores both her conscious and her sub-
conscious knowledge of racial discourse. Thirteen-year-old Arilla
publicly communicates her conscious knowledge of racial dis-
course in the nine chapters she narrates as the text’s first-person
extradiegetic narrator. Three of the chapters, however, are nar-
rated from her subconscious memories of events that happened
when she was five. Since as a thirteen-year-old she does not re-
member these events, these chapters are more private than those
that seem to be chapters of her public autobiography; they are also
narrated in a completely different voice that marks how Arilla
holds competing subject positions as an African American and
a Native American. As a five-year-old, she narrates the book’s
opening lines: ‘‘Late in the big night and snow has no end. Taking
me a long kind of time going to the hill. Would be afraid if not for
the moon and knowing Sun-Stone Father is sledding’’ (1). In con-
trast, her first lines that she narrates as a teenager read, ‘‘For sure,
my Birthday would be a disaster. I mean worse than the time they
tell about when that Learjet piloted by some rock-and-roll star-
boys crash-landed in Wilson Onderdock’s Black-Angus pasture a
mile outside of town’’ (18). The narrative distance the character
feels from the events she narrates in these two sections also serves
as a commentary on Arilla’s sense of alienation: Arilla experiences
separation not only from her community, but she is also separated
from some of her own empowering memories. The narrative dis-
junction that occurs between Arilla’s split voices represents how
devastating fragmentation is: as long as Arilla cannot remember
her past — that is, as long as part of her memory is exterior to her
own consciousness — she cannot find a place in her community
and must remain exterior to it.
The disjointed ‘‘rememories’’ (14) of Arilla’s fifth year focus on
her friendship with an Amerind couple who call her ‘‘ Word-
keeper’’ (173), identifying her as a tribal storyteller. The two of
them are the private, intradiegetic adult narrators who are also this
text’s Ideology keepers. They serve in loco parentis to Arilla as she
gradually enters the Symbolic Order. They are the parents she ef-
fectively kills; she does so by disremembering them once she has
entered the Symbolic Order. The father figure, James Talking
Story, pronounces the text’s ideology of race: ‘‘One time there are
blue-red-yellow birds, but all are one bird. There are black-brown-
white horses, but all one horse. It is so with all things living. So
with all trees and men. White, brown, black, yellow. Red. Once,
only red men. But not now. Now, all. All, with peace’’ (87). In
James’s discourse, race is masculine. His partner, Susanne Shy
Woman, states the text’s gender ideology in discourse that also
sublimates race to gender: ‘‘nobody knows what the reservation
been doing to the women. No woman ever sign a treaty I know
of, and maybe that’s the reason a treaty never hold together’’ (91).
I rather suspect that the women do, in fact, know what the reser-
vation is doing to them; Susanne’s ‘‘nobody knows’’ assigns
knowledge to men, regardless of their race. In any case, it is two
intradiegetic adult narrators serving as temporary parent figures
who articulate this text’s ideologies about race and gender.
As a thirteen-year-old, Arilla must integrate into her conscious-

ness what she learned as a five-year-old about being a Wordkeeper
before she can come to terms with her racial heritage and her
gender. One act serves to clarify both terms of her confusion.
When her brother is injured during an ice storm, she saves his life
in an act he considers one of ‘‘counting coup’’ (216). It is the first
time in their relationship that she takes a leadership role, and she
does so by relying on her repressed memories of herself as one of
The People. She successfully rides her horse through the storm,
sensing that she is surrounded by spirits, ‘‘things all around, I can
feel them’’ (199). Since she talked to James’s spirit after he died
when she was five, the reader may conclude that it is James Talking
Story’s spirit who is helping her again. She conquers her fears and
saves her brother when she ceases to rebel against James as her
father figure and shares authority by accepting the tribal knowl-
edge he offers her. Arilla renames herself ‘‘Arilla Sun Down’’ after
this experience, at once acknowledging that her brother does not
dominate her and that she is simultaneously African American and
of The People. Discursive and ideological knowledge give Arilla
power.
Once she accepts what Henderson would call the ‘‘plural as-
pects of self that constitute the matrix’’ of her subjectivity (18),
Arilla recognizes that her tribal role as Wordkeeper is a public role
for people of all races and genders. She no longer feels like an
outsider to her own family or her community, and as a result, she
makes her most powerful discovery about storytelling: ‘‘Maybe
that is writing, changing things around and disguising the for-real’’
(247). Words are the ultimate source of power for her because they
are the means by which she explores what truth is. Arilla discovers
this for herself, and in accepting her role as storyteller, feels that
she understands her place in her community and in her family.
Nevertheless, it is still adults who first hold the ideological truths
that Arilla must learn. The point is even linguistically verifiable
within the text’s discourse: ‘‘truth’’ is Arilla’s father’s favorite in-
terjection (21, 62, 233, 234, 235, 239), but Arilla does not appro-
priate this word, this Name-of-the-Father, for her own diction
until after she has renamed herself ‘‘Arilla Sun Down,’’ that is,
until after she has learned the truth about herself and become
more of an adult, more of an insider to the communities she be-
gins to claim as her own (209, 231). But she does not wield this
power until she has been the narratee of two adults’ ideological
lessons for her.
In Arilla Sun Down, The Catcher in the Rye, Toning the Sweep, and
Ironman, adults hold the knowledge that represents the highest
goal: truth. No adolescent is given the opportunity to be as wise.
The only way teenagers can obtain that goal is to grow, to quit
being adolescents themselves, to become more like the insiders,
the adults. But if that is the case, by that formulation young adults
automatically become outsiders in their own novels. I am often
surprised by the number of ya novels that imply the same ide-
ology to adolescent readers: stop being an adolescent and become
an adult. Perhaps S. E. Hinton was more broadly accurate than
even she knew when she named her first novel The Outsiders.
Wisdom is, by its very nature, the province of adulthood; chil-
dren learn from adults because adults often do know more than
adolescents — although authors like Virginia Hamilton, Chris
Crutcher, Robert Cormier, Madeleine L’Engle, and Cynthia Voigt
are always scrupulous about depicting at least some smart teen-
agers and some adults who know far less than the adolescents
around them. But when James Talking Story knows more than
Arilla or Mr. Antolini knows more than Holden Caulfield, it is
difficult to determine whether adults are teaching adolescents or
reinforcing their lack of knowledge. Are the adults emphasizing
the adolescents’ powerlessness, or are the adults nurturing the ad-
olescents so as to eventually empower them? Are these novels an
example of adults appropriating the position of power, or are they
simply reflecting a reality that allows adolescents to grow? The
answers probably lie somewhere on the spectrum between these
two polarities because, as Foucault points out, power can be both
repressive and enabling; it is from within the confines of power-
lessness that people rebel and discover their own power (History
36– 49; Discipline 195–228). Thus, if Mr. Antolini is temporarily
appropriating Holden’s power, it is possible that this repression is
one avenue that will eventually force Holden to discover what
means of power are available to him. Perhaps Holden must nec-
essarily be the object of Antolini’s didactic impulse in order to
grow. Like all teenagers, Holden must experience powerlessness
as a necessary condition of growing into power.
Peter Hollindale argues that adolescent literature is by defini-

tion a literature about transitions; that in providing examples of
epiphany that serve effectively to instruct adolescents about their
potential, the literature serves as a bridge between childhood and
adulthood (Signs 116–131). Thus, Hollindale might conclude that
the tension between the positioning of the adolescent and the
adult in ya literature is a function of the genre’s transitive nature.
ya novels are teaching adolescents how to become adults be-
cause that is their function. Hollindale’s explanation is very toler-
ant of — and even explains — the didacticism in the literature.
According to his view, teaching adolescents about growth is the
whole point.
But whatever else we conclude, whether we decide that the
power transactions between adolescents and adults in ya literature
are heinous, enabling, or inevitable, the fact remains that the dis-
cursive practice of employing a wise adult to guide a confused
adolescent is so commonplace in adolescent literature that it is
practically invisible even to many trained readers. Take Chris
Crutcher’s Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes as an example. On the most
superficial level, Sarah Byrnes is a sports novel about successful
competitive swimmers. Far more important, the novel can be clas-
sified as what Hollindale would call an ‘‘adolescent novel of ideas’’
because of its unflinching look at a variety of controversial topics,
including abortion, child abuse, and religious tolerance (‘‘Adoles-
cent’’ 86). The first-person narrator, called ‘‘Moby’’ because he is
fat and a swimmer, is friends with Sarah Byrnes, whose face has
been intentionally burned by her abusive father. Sarah’s mother
has abandoned her family out of fear of Mr. Byrnes’s monstrosity;
Sarah is temporarily devastated when she discovers that the
mother she has created for herself in logos parentis will not defend
her against Byrnes’s attacks. One level of the narrative action in-
volves how he is finally brought to justice by Carver Middleton,
an accountant who dates Moby’s mother. The other narrative line
shows how a self-righteous evangelical Christian named Mark
Brittain learns to become more tolerant of both religious differ-
ence and his own imperfections when he eventually faces his re-
sponsibility in his girlfriend’s abortion. The adolescent characters
are connected through Ms. Lemry, the swimming coach and
teacher of a course called Contemporary American Thought.
Ms. Lemry is one of the three adult characters involved in di-

rectly articulating this text’s explicit ideologies. Mr. Ellerby, an
Episcopalian minister who helps Brittain gain some measure of
self-forgiveness, makes direct statements about the importance of
the separation of church and state, religious tolerance, and recog-
nizing our own imperfections (171, 198). Carver Middleton, the
accountant turned vigilante who brings Mr. Byrnes down, con-
demns the Vietnam War and affirms the importance of recogniz-
ing our personal social responsibility (211). His words about social
responsibility contribute to the text’s dialogics about abortion, re-
ligion, and changing society. The astute reader can ultimately con-
clude that Crutcher advocates individual social involvement,
whether or not we are guided by religious faith. Coach Lemry
serves as the third adult who carries the burden of the narrative’s
ideology. She even adopts Sarah Byrnes by the end of the novel,
affirming her authority in loco parentis quite substantively.
The Contemporary American Thought course that Lemry
teaches serves as an arena for showcasing many of the text’s ex-
plicit ideologies. She insists that students learn to be respectful
of divergent opinions and that they are accountable for their ac-
tions in her class. She even teaches them that ideology is relative
when she tells them, ‘‘No issue is isolated. . . . because our points
of view — the way we perceive things — are inextricably linked to
our beliefs’’ (98, emphasis in the original). At this point in the
novel, Moby still controls the narrative as the extradiegetic narra-
tor. But in chapter 17, when Ms. Lemry narrates the story of how
she and Sarah Byrnes have confronted Sarah’s mother, she be-
comes an adult intradiegetic narrator assuming narrative authority.
During that passage, Lemry communicates indirectly but explicitly
a key ideology in this novel of ideas: adults are responsible for
protecting children. The assertion is one I believe so firmly that it
feels to me like Truth rather than ideology. Nevertheless, it is a
sentiment that I recognize as one that directs power away from
adolescents and toward adults. It also raises an interesting ques-
tion about the implied reader of this novel. Is it adolescents who
most need to learn the lesson that adults are responsible for pro-
tecting their children? Or is it adults who need to learn that lesson?
How the implied reader is positioned in a text helps us to un-
derstand some aspect of the multivariate relationship between
power and ideology in adolescent literature. Crutcher’s Staying Fat

for Sarah Byrnes is ostensibly pitched to adolescents and yet much
of the text’s explicit ideology is pitched to adults. Many textual
references, moreover, are coded to appeal to Baby Boomers,
hardly the age group meant to be reading a ya novel published in
1993. Crutcher’s references include Raymond Burr, William Con-
rad, Perry Mason, Bob Dylan, Buddy Holly, the Byrds, the Dave
Clark Five, the Turtles, Alex Haley’s Roots, The Stepford Wives, the
Son of Sam, Edgar Bergen, and the Lovin’ Spoonful (3, 11, 23, 36,
79, 91, 102, 106). Ostensibly, the narrator is a fan of sixties and
seventies music because his mother buys him one CD of music
recorded between 1956 and 1975 for every more recent one he
buys, but the only contemporary music the text references is a
mention of one character’s Twisted Sister T-shirt. Perhaps by em-
ploying cultural references Crutcher considers classic, he is avoid-
ing the problem of ‘‘evanescence’’ that Caroline Hunt describes
existing as a liability for ya novels: cultural references in teen cul-
ture change every few years, rendering any book that describes
pop culture in contemporary terms obsolete in a few years (5). Or
perhaps he is out of touch with teen culture. Either way, the net
result of a phrase like the reference to one character’s having ‘‘a
zeal rivaled only by Alex Haley’s relentless search for Kunta
Kinte’’ is the possible alienation of adolescent readers. Taken to-
gether with the fact that the majority of the novel’s explicit ideolo-
gies are articulated by adult characters, the Baby Boomer-directed
allusions in Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes would seem to have a high
potential for displacing the adolescent implied reader.
Whenever I read a novel that seems to preclude the possibility

of an adolescent reader who can fully apprehend the text, I begin
to wonder about the purpose of adolescent literature. Is Staying
Fat for Sarah Byrnes simply a failed novel because of the cultural
gaps? Or is it just more direct about the relationship between the
adolescent and the adult than most Anglo-American ya novels?
Are its time-bound allusions simply a result of Crutcher’s chrono-
logical age? Or is it possible that he is foregrounding an inherent
tension in the genre that requires us to question the very purpose
of the genre? If this last is true, perhaps Crutcher is implying that
the ultimate purpose of adolescent literature is to teach adoles-
cents to quit being adolescents. If that is the case, the genre is

indeed a dark one. Jacqueline Rose might even call it ‘‘impos-
sible’’ in the same way that she calls children’s literature inherently
contradictory because of ‘‘the impossible relation between adult
and child. . . . Children’s fiction sets up a world in which the
adult comes first (author, maker, giver) and the child comes after
(reader, product, receiver). . . . Children’s fiction sets up the child
as an outsider to its own process, and then aims, unashamedly,
to take the child in’’ (1–2, emphasis in the original). Since the
necessity of growth is foregrounded even more often in adoles-
cent than children’s literature, perhaps ya novels are even more
‘‘impossible.’’
But I prefer to think of them as paradoxical. Although chil-
dren’s literature is capable of celebrating ‘‘childness’’ — the char-
acteristics associated with childhood (Hollindale, Signs 44 – 48)—
adolescent literature seems to delegitimize adolescents, insisting
that ‘‘adolescentness,’’ especially immaturity, is unacceptable, even
though the surface intention of most ya novels is ostensibly to
legitimize adolescence. Texts accomplish this delegitimization by
conveying frequently to readers the ideological message that they
need to grow up, to give up the subject position culturally marked
‘‘adolescent.’’ In order to mature, they need to murder the parent
who represses their power, regardless of whether that parent is
actual, surrogate, or imaginary, so that they can fully enter into the
Symbolic Order. Since so many adolescent novels contain parents
who must be rebelled against and adult narrators who are the
source of the text’s often repressive ideological wisdom, the genre
does seem to communicate to teenagers that authority is not and
should not be theirs. In communicating such ideologies to adoles-
cent readers, the genre itself becomes an Ideological State Appa-
ratus, an institution that participates in the social construction
of the adolescent as someone who must be repressed for the
greater good.
chapter 4
‘‘All of a sudden I came’’

sex and power in adolescent novels
he protagonist of Norma Klein’s It’s OK if You Don’t
T Love Me (1977) experiences orgasms easily. Twice she

climaxes ‘‘all of a sudden’’ (78, 142), which is in
marked contrast to the protagonist of Judy Blume’s
Forever (1975), who says, ‘‘at last I came’’ (149–150). For both girls,
reaching their sexual potential feels truly potent. The same is true
in the obverse for male characters in Robert Cormier’s The Choco-
late War, who experience powerlessness as impotence. When Jerry
Renault perceives himself as a J. Alfred Prufrock, unable to disturb
the universe, he is incapable of achieving climax (93). Sexual po-
tency is a common metaphor for empowerment in adolescent lit-
erature, so the genre is replete with sex. Teenage characters in ya
novels agonize about almost every aspect of human sexuality: de-
cisions about whether to have sex, issues of sexual orientation,
issues of birth control and responsibility, unwanted pregnancies,
masturbation, orgasms, nocturnal emissions, sexually transmitted
diseases, pornography, and prostitution. The occasional teenage
protagonist even quits agonizing about sexuality long enough to
enjoy sex, but such characters seem more the exception than the
rule. But for many characters in ya novels, experiencing sexuality
marks a rite of passage that helps them define themselves as hav-
ing left childhood behind.
Typically, sexuality as a rite of passage is linked with romance
in ya literature. Romantic ya novels follow a relatively predictable
pattern, demonstrated by such novels as Virginia Hamilton’s A
White Romance (1987), a book that consciously plays on the ro-
mance tradition. Generally speaking, two teenagers feel sexually
attracted to one another in a standard ya romance. The action is
occasionally blocked during a stage in which each character thinks
the attraction is unrequited. The characters eventually communi-
Sex and Power : 85
cate and express their attraction. Then the action is blocked while
they make decisions about consummating their passion. More of-
ten than not, they express their passion with some sort of sexual
contact. In A White Romance, two characters named David and Tal-
ley are so consumed by their passion that they have sex on the
kitchen floor in a friend’s apartment. And then — in A White Ro-
mance, as in most ya romances — all hell breaks loose. One char-
acter or the other regrets the action or betrays the other or ends
up pregnant, creating what proves to be the most extended con-
flict in the book. (In A White Romance, David uses racial politics to
manipulate Talley.) After the conflict is resolved — Talley, in this
case, quits dating David and starts to date instead a classmate who
respects her — the protagonist ends up sadder and wiser, and the
reader has been exposed to a very direct ideology: sexuality is
powerful and can hurt people. Although nonromantic ya novels
about sexual victimization like Voigt’s When She Hollers (1994) and
Block’s The Hanged Man (1994) do not follow the predictable
made-for-TV patterns replicated in books like Zindel’s David and
Della (1993) and Hadley Irwin’s Abby, My Love (1985), they do still
share the same ideological message that sex is more to be feared
than celebrated.
As a result, adolescent literature is as often an ideological tool
used to curb teenagers’ libido as it is some sort of depiction of
what adolescents’ sexuality actually is. Adolescents certainly do
not have one shared sexuality or even share common opinions
about sexuality, but many ya novels seem to assume that the
reader has a sexual naı̈veté in need of correction. Some ya novels
seem more preoccupied with influencing how adolescent readers
will behave when they are not reading than with describing human
sexuality honestly. Such novels tend to be heavy-handed in their
moralism and demonstrate relatively clearly the effect of adult
authors asserting authority over adolescent readers. Moreover,
adolescent novels that deal with sex, whether they are obviously
ideological, usually contain within them some sort of power dy-
namic wherein the character’s sexuality provides him or her with
a locus of power. That power needs to be controlled before the
narrative can achieve resolution.
As a topic, then, sexuality in ya novels often includes a lesson
for the reader to learn, and the topic also illustrates how language
86 : Sex and Power
controls our perceptions of a bodily function. In other words,

sexuality is inseparable from language; it is influenced by and even
constructed by the words that people think and say. Thus, sexu-
ality in this genre is discursive and ideological. To illustrate the
ideological nature of sexuality in ya novels, I will first employ
Michel Foucault’s theories to assess didacticism at work in sev-
eral novels that focus on heterosexual teenagers, including Judy
Blume’s Forever. Second, an examination of jouissance illustrates
Foucault’s depiction of the relationship between knowledge and
power in creating sexual pleasure; Madeleine L’Engle’s A House
Like a Lotus (1984) proves especially useful in examining these
issues. Finally, books about male and female homosexuality sur-
face cultural assumptions about the discursive nature of sexuality.
Aidan Chambers’s Dance on My Grave (1982), Francesca Lia Block’s
Baby Be-Bop (1995), M. E. Kerr’s Deliver Us from Evie (1994), and
Nancy Garden’s Good Moon Rising (1996) are books that tie the
discursive nature of sexuality to the power/repression dynamic at
work in much of adolescent literature.
The Ideology of Sexuality
In contrast to ‘‘sex,’’ which is a purely biological act, Foucault

defines ‘‘sexuality’’ as a discursive construct (History 68 – 69). That
is, sexuality is influenced by, even created by, language. Although
his critics have decried the ways that this definition denies the
prediscursive physicality of human sexuality, Foucault’s notions of
the discursive quality of sexuality are particularly useful in analyz-
ing sexuality in literature, where every action is, quite literally, al-
ways already and only constructed by language.1 According to
Foucault, Western cultures have separated sexuality from sex as a
way to regulate it. Sex is the biological action in Foucault’s econ-
omy; sexuality is the all-encompassing mores and discourses that
have arisen to define and regulate human sex acts (History 33–35).
Foucault’s The History of Sexuality demonstrates that regulating
sexuality is central to the ways that Western cultures define them-
selves. He suggests that far from being on the verge of being lib-
erated by discourses of sexuality, Western cultures are dependent
on a definition of sexuality as repressed. Western discourses about
Sex and Power : 87
sex are repressed, he argues, because any number of institutions

from the Catholic Church to Freudian analysis have gone to in-
genious lengths to create monumental rhetorical systems (such as
confession as sacrament or psychoanalysis) that depend on people
talking about sex. The result is a social obsession with sexuality:
‘‘ What is peculiar to modern societies, in fact, is not that they
consigned sex to a shadow existence, but that they dedicated
themselves to speaking of it ad infinitum, while exploiting it as the
secret’’ (History 35).
Foucault also thinks of human sexuality in terms of two things:
discourse and power. He asserts that in Western culture, sexuality
depends on a power/repression dynamic: sex is so powerful that it
must be but cannot be controlled. In contrast to Eastern cultures
that base their attitudes about sexuality on notions of pleasure to
create an ars sexualis, Western cultures have developed an entire
scientia sexualis founded on the relationship between discourse and
knowledge to increase the (forbidden) pleasure of sexuality, Fou-
cault observes, and this ‘‘regime of power-knowledge-pleasure . . .
sustains discourse on human sexuality in our part of the world’’
(History 11). This relationship between power and knowledge is
grounded in discourse: ‘‘Indeed, it is in discourse that power and
knowledge are joined together’’ (History 100). The specific plea-
sure of toying with the discourse of sexuality is grounded in the
desire to at once control and exploit sexuality:
We have at least invented a different kind of pleasure: pleasure
in the truth of pleasure, the pleasure of knowing that truth, of
discovering and exposing it, the fascination of seeing it and
telling it, of captivating and capturing others by it, of confiding
it in secret, of luring it out in the open — the specific pleasure
of the true discourse on pleasure. (History 71)
These two beliefs — that the power/repression dynamic sur-
rounding sexuality has led to the creation of a discourse that pre-
tends to cloak but actually exposes sexuality and that knowledge
and pleasure are woven inextricably into the fabric of that dis-
course — lead Foucault to theorize that Western ideas about sexu-
ality depend on notions of deviance to define what is allegedly
mainstream or normal. In many ya novels, teenage sexuality is
defined in terms of deviancy — even when the message to the
88 : Sex and Power
reader is a Judy Blume special: ‘‘Your masturbating/wetdreams/

desire to have sex /(fill-in-the-blank) is normal.’’ 2 Such novels re-
flect cultural norms that tend to define teenage sexuality in terms
of deviancy in an attempt to control adolescents; nonetheless,
reassurances to teenagers that their actions are normal still start
from the assumption that someone thinks their actions are not.
Judy Blume’s Forever is a classic in this genre. As seventeen-year-
old Katherine decides to have sex, the narrative sends the reader
conflicting messages that demonstrate Foucault’s principle that
Western cultures at once liberate and repress sexuality. The text of
Forever has an obvious explicit ideology: it is normal for teenagers
to want to have sex. Moreover, Blume seems to have written
Forever as a self-help manual to help teenagers learn more about
sex: the book describes having vaginal examinations (138 –139),
how to get birth control (chapters 14 and 15), a basic description
of penises (85), condom usage (113), premature ejaculation (114),
impotence (167), sexual relations during menstruation (70), vene-
real disease (104), experiencing a broken hymen (115), premarital
pregnancy (154 –155), giving a baby up for adoption (179), and a
play-by-play description of how to have intercourse (149–150).
The text tries to liberate teenage sexuality by communicating that
curiosity about sex is natural, but it then undercuts this message
with a series of messages framed by institutional discourses that
imply teenagers should not have sex or else should feel guilty if
they do.
For example, in Katherine’s first heavy-petting session with her
boyfriend, Michael asks her if she is a virgin. She says she is and
tells him, ‘‘ Well, now you know,’’ to which he replies, ‘‘Don’t get
defensive, Katherine. It’s nothing to be ashamed of’’ (28). At one
level the dialogue could be criticized for its lack of verisimilitude:
it is hard to imagine a teenage boy who has been fondling his
girlfriend on a sofa for an hour being coolly analytical as he says
of her virginity, ‘‘It’s nothing to be ashamed of.’’ But even more
important, the dialogue can be criticized for its hypocrisy, for
the language is couched in institutional discourse with rhetoric
ostensibly about patriarchal attitudes toward girls’ chastity that
are thinly disguised reinforcements of those values. I read those
words and cannot help thinking, ‘‘Shame never crossed my mind
until Michael said no one should be ashamed.’’ The passage re-
Sex and Power : 89
minds me of an injunction against thinking about pink elephants:

we cannot help it once we have been told not to. Katherine has
internalized the institutionalized sanctions against sex, which be-
comes clear when she later thinks, ‘‘Even though I know it’s natu-
ral and I’m glad my parents love each other I can’t help feeling
embarrassed,’’ when she overhears their lovemaking (58 –59). For-
ever doth protest too loudly: the reader may learn to feel shame
about sex from being told not to feel ashamed.
Several institutional voices are implicated in the deconstructive
ideologies at work in Forever. Katherine mentions that she has re-
ceived sex education from school, from her parents, and from her
grandparents. In fact, Katherine’s grandmother is a lawyer who
advocates freedom of choice; she counsels her granddaughter
early and often about making wise choices with her sexuality:
‘‘Just be careful . . . that’s my only advice.’’
‘‘Of what?’’
‘‘Pregnancy.’’
‘‘Grandma!’’
‘‘And venereal disease.’’
‘‘Really . . .’’
‘‘Does it embarrass you to talk about it?’’
‘‘No, but . . .’’
‘‘It shouldn’t.’’
‘‘But listen, Grandma . . . we aren’t sleeping together.’’
‘‘Yet,’’ Grandma said. (43– 44, ellipses in the original)
Katherine’s grandmother encourages her to go to the Margaret
Sanger clinic to get birth control, and her parents have designated
the family den as the appropriate place for her to bring dates
rather than going parking because ‘‘it isn’t safe, not because of
anything we might do, but because there are a lot of crazies in this
world and they have been known to prey on couples who are out
parking’’ (26). Her mother tells her, ‘‘It’s up to you to decide
what’s right and what’s wrong . . . I’m not going to tell you to go
ahead but I’m not going to forbid it either. It’s too late for any of
that. I expect you to handle it with a sense of responsibility
though . . . either way’’ (93, ellipses in the original). On the
one hand, Katherine has a strongly defined matriarchal support-
system, but on the other hand, her mother and grandmother both
90 : Sex and Power
construct intercourse in terms of something that requires emo-

tional and physical protection, implying Katherine’s vulnerability.
Katherine’s mother gives her an article that typifies the text’s
confused ideology. Called ‘‘ What about the right to say ‘no’?
Sexual liberation’’ and authored by ‘‘the director of medical clinics
at Yale’’ (120), the article asks its readers to consider whether in-
tercourse is necessary to their relationship, what they expect of it,
where they can seek help, and whether they have ‘‘thought about
how this relationship will end’’ (120). The final question upsets
Katherine with its implication that all teen relationships end. The
article implies that teenage sexuality is therefore suspect because
it rarely occurs within permanent relationships. The author of the
article is clearly someone who disapproves of the concept of
‘‘sexual liberation.’’
The whole of Forever carries the same message: kids are freer
about sex than they were prior to the 1970s, but they still end up
getting hurt. In this discourse, sexuality is at once liberated and
repressed. For example, Katherine is hurt when her relationship
with Michael ends because she is attracted to another male; Mi-
chael seems even more hurt than she is by their breakup. In an-
other example, Katherine’s friend Erica pressures a thinly dis-
guised gay male to have sex with her; his inability to do so leads
him to attempt suicide. Another friend, Sybil, gets pregnant and
says, ‘‘I could have had an abortion but I wanted the experience
of giving birth’’ (180). Her callowness comes back to haunt her,
however, for she has more trouble giving the baby up for adop-
tion than she had imagined. These teenagers may be enjoying
their sexuality, but the consequences are devastating to them, and
Blume wants the reader to know that.
The mixed message about repressing and liberating sexuality is
frequently grounded in this text as it is in many ya novels in gen-
der politics. Such texts as Forever, Edith Jackson (1978), and My Dar-
ling, My Hamburger (1969) imply that sexual liberation is a good
thing, but that it is the girl’s job to make sure that male sexuality
is not so liberated that she becomes victimized.3 When Michael
tells Katherine to enjoy her physical impulses, she says, ‘‘I have to
control my body with my mind’’ (57) and ‘‘I don’t like to lose
control of myself’’ (84); she is the one who tells him when they
need to stop (27, 73). Katherine is the apotheosis of control: she
Sex and Power : 91
is a young woman who not only never forgets to make her bed
but who also cannot even imagine how anyone else would forget
(146). She defines herself in terms of control — but is complicit-
ous in her boyfriend’s inability to control himself.
The double standard about sexuality is reinforced by the ob-
jectification of women that occurs in this book. Pleasing men
seems to be Katherine’s highest goal. She wears light blue on their
first date because she ‘‘once read that boys like light blue on a
girl better than any other color’’ (23). Katherine criticizes her
mother’s ‘‘flabby thighs’’ (29, 177), and she accepts Erica’s expla-
nation that Katherine’s father is overprotective because he is just
being Freudian (63). When she is going skiing with Michael, Kath-
erine teases, ‘‘How can I get buried in an avalanche with Michael
watching out for me?’’ (66). And when Katherine wants to be on
top during their lovemaking one night, he calls her ‘‘aggressive’’
(186). She seems to recoil, ‘‘I hadn’t thought about that until he
said it. I was surprised myself. ‘Do you mind?’ ’’ (186). Of course
he doesn’t — but the fact that so much is made of how unusual
the situation is defines what ‘‘normal’’ intercourse should look like
for teenage girls. The astute female reader has much to learn from
this ostensibly liberating book about how to be a ‘‘good’’ (read:
‘‘repressed’’) girl.
One thing Forever tries to do right is to depict Katherine having
orgasms. It may be unbelievable that she has them at all, but at
least Blume commits herself to depicting female pleasure. But the
scenes in which she does are oddly clinical and lack detail:
He rolled over on top of me and we moved together again
and again and it felt so good I didn’t ever want to stop — until
I came.
After a minute I reached for Michael’s hand. (85)
I let my hands wander across his stomach and down his legs
and finally I began to stroke Ralph [Michael’s penis].
‘‘Oh, yes . . . yes . . .’’ I said, as Michael made me come. And
he came too.
We covered up with the patchwork quilt and rested. (111,
ellipses in the original)
This time Michael made it last much, much longer and I got so
carried away I grabbed his backside with both hands, trying to
92 : Sex and Power
push him deeper and deeper into me — and I spread my legs

as far apart as I could — and I raised my hips off the bed—
and I moved with him, again and again and again — and at last
I came. I came right before Michael and as I did I made noises,
just like my mother. Michael did too. (149–150)
No doubt Blume felt the need to circumscribe her descriptions of

Katherine’s pleasure lest the book be censored even more than it
already is, but it is hard to think of a book being sexually liberating
when it has such a heavy-handed ideological agenda and when it
is so dispassionate in depicting female jouissance.4 Katherine sums
up the book’s ideology in the final passage: she thinks she was
ready to love Michael and to have sex, but she is not ready for a
permanent commitment. ‘‘I think it’s just that I’m not ready for
forever’’ (220). Given that so much of the book has been dedi-
cated to communicating to teenagers that they should not have
sex outside of committed relationships, that final message does
seem to contradict Katherine’s loud declamations about her self-
confident assertion of her sexuality.
Teaching adolescents to repress their liberated sexualities is a
recurring theme in the Entwicklungsromane of the late 1960s and
early 1970s. Many of the novels in this genre define themselves
in terms of sexual dilemmas, but they share a moral tone sanc-
tioned by the dominant culture. Undoubtedly, it is the under-
current of disapproval about liberated teenage sexuality that al-
lowed these books to get past the de facto censorship of ya
publishing. Books like Paul Zindel’s My Darling, My Hamburger and
Rosa Guy’s Edith Jackson show teenage girls who are hurt by their
own lack of self-control: both books depict teenage girls who get
abortions. Zindel condemns the character he creates who has an
abortion, whereas Guy applauds her character, who decides not
to give birth to an unwanted child, but regardless of whether their
agendas are pro-life or pro-choice, both books imply that promis-
cuous sex in the first place is the real problem. Beatrice Sparks’s
Go Ask Alice (1971) ties sex to drug abuse: the narrator of the
journal ends up prostituting herself to buy drugs. Although the
ideology is clearly antidrug, the book contains an implied message
that the worst thing that can happen to a teenage girl is her own
self-commodification of her sexuality. W. Keith Kraus pointed out
Sex and Power : 93
in 1975 that too many problem novels are ideologically heavy-

handed when he wrote, ‘‘the sexual act itself is never depicted as
joyful, and any show of intimacy carries a warning of future dan-
ger’’ in these novels (22). Sex leads to disaster for many adolescent
characters.
Ironically enough, Judy Blume claims to have written Forever as
an antidote to these type of books:
I wrote the book Forever . . . , when [my daughter] was fourteen.
She asked if I could write about two nice kids who fall in love,
do it, and nothing terrible happens to them. Randy had read a
number of books that year that linked sex with punishment. If
a girl succumbed she would wind up with a grisly abortion,
abandonment and a life ruined. I think Randy was bothered
by the message of those books in which boys never had any
feelings and were only interested in using girls. And neither
boys nor girls ever felt responsible for their actions. (Letters to
Judy, 204)
In Blume’s haste to communicate about sexual responsibility,
however, her book becomes as didactic as those she condemns. It
proves ultimately impossible for her to write a novel about teen-
age sexuality without linking the story to societally sanctioned
ideologies.
The same could be said more than twenty years later, for even
when novels like Block’s Weetzie Bat (1989) and Sparks’s It Hap-
pened to Nancy (1994) describe sexuality, they still carry the un-
avoidable ideological overtones of the dominant culture. Weetzie
Bat, for example, is predicated on the notion that sexual ex-
pressions of love are good, whether they are expressed between
people of the same or opposite sexes. But Block cannot escape
the trappings of our culture: writing within a post-aids culture,
she only sanctions sex that occurs between committed, loving
couples in permanent relationships. Block’s books carry no more
approval for promiscuous sex than do Blume’s. Weetzie, in fact,
gets beat up and date-raped when she does not carefully guard her
sexuality in a blaming-the-victim scene early in the novel: ‘‘ Weet-
zie glimpsed the handcuffs for a second before Buzz had her
down on the mattress. She kept her eyes on the bare bulb until it
blinded her’’ (12). The next day a friend notices the ‘‘tattoo-like
94 : Sex and Power
bruise’’ Buzz has given her and forbids her to see him anymore
(13); the text is vague about whether Weetzie ever would have
figured out for herself that her relationship with Buzz has been
self-destructive.
It Happened to Nancy is an even clearer case of blaming the vic-
tim: Nancy is date-raped by a conniving pederast and then dies of
aids in a dramatically short period of time. Although the text
directly tells any reader who has been the victim of a rape ‘‘you
were not responsible’’ (223) and although Nancy’s mother
tells her daughter, ‘‘it wasn’t my fault, that I shouldn’t blame my-
self,’’ Nancy still thinks she is ultimately responsible for being a
sexual victim: ‘‘If a kid wants to do some crazy thing, she’ll find a
way. Like me — cutting school and stuff’’ (34). Nancy’s boyfriend
echoes her Victorian sexual attitudes:
He told me that when his parents had said that they were going
to divorce, right then and there he made a commitment, sol-
emn as it could be, that he would never have sex until he was
married. He had heard that word sex over and over between
his parents, and even though he was only ten and didn’t really
understand what sex really meant at that point, he knew it was
the thing that had destroyed the family. His dad was having
sex with other women, and with his mom sick and all, it was
really dreadful, dreadful, DREADFUL! (65– 66, emphasis in
the original)
Beatrice Sparks — so-called editor (but I assume author) of both
Go Ask Alice and It Happened to Nancy, although they are both mar-
keted to teenagers as anonymously written diaries — has the same
agenda in 1994 as she does in 1973 in Go Ask Alice. She wants girls
to stay in control of their sexuality so that they do not get hurt.
The goal may be admirable, but it comes at the cost of stigmatiz-
ing all sexuality.
Similarly, Chris Crutcher seems to have the best of intentions
in Running Loose. Louie Banks and his girlfriend Becky ski to a
secluded cabin, intending to spend the night, and Louie decides
he is not ready to have sex, so they don’t. Although Louie is
a virgin, Becky is not; she has had at least one other lover.
Crutcher’s intent to communicate to macho guys that they do not
need to force their sexuality on anyone to prove anything is com-
Sex and Power : 95
mendable — except in the way that it reinforces notions that

males are predatory and women are vulnerable. That Becky dies
in a car wreck soon after this scene reinforces both characters’
vulnerability. It is as if she has to die for being a scarlet woman
and he has to atone for his sin of making her the object of his lust
by losing her forever.
Realistically speaking, we live in a society that objectifies teen
sexuality, at once glorifying and idealizing it while also stigmatizing
and repressing it. Foucault might argue that adults enjoy lecturing
to adolescents about sexuality because it gives the adult power and
a certain sexual pleasure, the scintillation present in the act of for-
bidding. For one thing, the adult holds the power, becomes the
dominatrix as it were, and for another thing, the adult has the
opportunity to discuss the forbidden in that circular pattern of
mentioning the unmentionable that Foucault demonstrates typi-
fies Western discourses about sexuality. The adultism ya authors
hold in this situation is formidable.
I would also add that the adultist power these authors hold is
very much tied to gender politics. Male and female authors alike
who communicate that sex is to be avoided to protect vulnerable
females ultimately end up affirming the patriarchal status quo, no
matter how good their intentions. Until the unlikely day when
Western cultures can define sexuality in terms of jouissance instead
of repression, discourses about adolescent sexuality are likely to
remain stultified in this Möbius strip of denying sexual pleasure
and then deriving pleasure from discussing that denial.
At this point, I can imagine many people — especially par-
ents — asking me if I am actually proposing either divorcing sex
from ideology or even worse, advocating that teenagers engage in
promiscuous sex. I cannot say that I am, although I would prefer
to live in a culture with entirely different values regarding sexuality.
What I am proposing for the here and now, however, is that par-
ents and teachers and librarians and literary critics take serious
looks at the ideological intent behind most of the ya novels
published with the seeming intent of validating teenagers’ self-
assurance about human sexuality. Most ya novels about teenage
sexuality have at best a conflicting ideology and at worst a repres-
sive ideology that both reflects and perpetuates Western culture’s
confused sexual mores. But the very existence of these repressive
96 : Sex and Power
ideologies demonstrates that sexuality is a locus of power for ad-

olescents. If it were not, adults would feel no need to regulate
teenagers’ sexuality.
Sex and Power/Knowledge/Pleasure
Nothing demonstrates the power relationships between adults

and teenagers as effectively as the abuse of sexual power. Novels
about incest, for example, demonstrate the misappropriation of
adult power over the nonadult body of a child or adolescent: Had-
ley Irwin’s Abby, My Love; Block’s The Hanged Man; Voigt’s When
She Hollers; Grimsley’s Dream Boy (1995); and Chbosky’s The Perks
of Being a Wallflower (1999) depict the emotional repercussions for
children sexually abused by parent figures. Each of these novels
revolves around the necessary precondition of an adult who is
capable of turning a child into an object. In each case, sexual plea-
sure and sexual knowledge are the provenance of the adult per-
petrator rather than the child victim. And each of these books
contains at least some possible bibliotherapeutic potential for
readers. Especially in the case of The Perks of Being a Wallflower and
The Hanged Man, the child victims learn they have power over their
own voice: they can overcome their victimization only by talking
about it. It is significant that these texts communicate to readers
that victims can have some form of power. Ultimately, the incest
survivors in these novels learn about repression and empower-
ment, but only because their bodies have been completely disem-
powered at some point in their lives.
On the opposite end of the spectrum are novels in which teen-
agers celebrate their sexuality free from both adult repression and
victimization. In novels as diverse as Aidan Chambers’s Breaktime
and Madeleine L’Engle’s A House Like a Lotus, teenagers derive
pleasure from their increased knowledge of sexuality. Their sub-
sequent sense of empowerment illustrates Foucault’s principle of
the power/knowledge/pleasure dynamic: characters who have
positive experiences with sexuality are usually strengthened by
the experience. Authors who depict teenagers experiencing ex-
treme sexual pleasure also tend to minimize the repressive use of
ideology.
Sex and Power : 97
In Breaktime, for example, Aidan Chambers is unusual in de-

picting a heterosexual scene from a male perspective that allows
for female sexual agency and does not devolve into didacticism.
Both characters seem empowered by their sexuality. Here, modi-
fied from the original style to facilitate the restrictions of aca-
demic style, is an excerpt from the climax of the book, the prose
poem section in which the protagonist, Ditto, describes a sexual
encounter:
Her hands ran down my chest, across my stomach. Found the
clasp of my jeans. Undid it. Drew down the zip. Pushed jeans
and pants below my knees. . . . She pulled at me, turning me
over upon her, urgently, as she fell back upon the ground. And
gave me entrance with a deep delighting sigh. And then there
were no more words no more thoughts Nothing but move-
ment body on Flesh on flesh on Mouth and hands and legs and
thrusting driving wild relief felt during her high long scream.
(158 –162)
The sex scene proves to be a rite of passage for the protagonist,
Ditto. After he has sex, he is able to empathize with his father for
the first time, which implies that sex is what makes him a man.
Although that in itself seems a somewhat dubious premise and a
reinforcement of patriarchal ideology, at least Ditto and Helen
have enjoyed their shared sexual experience and neither ends up
diseased, pregnant, emotionally devastated, or dead. In a strategy
unusual for this genre, Chambers allows the teenagers power that
is predicated on pleasure and knowledge of that pleasure.
Norma Klein’s Jody Epstein and Lyle Alexander enjoy their
sexuality and work together to ensure that they both achieve pleas-
urable orgasms in It’s OK if You Don’t Love Me. For all that Jody is
a bit neurotic and self-obsessed, her openness about sexuality,
learned from her mother, is refreshing. In a particularly Freudian
turn of events, she experiences her first orgasm during intercourse
after she and Lyle have defeated her father and another man at
tennis. Once Jody feels more powerful than her father, she is fi-
nally free to experience her own jouissance.
Several feminist authors depict sexual pleasure by relying on
some form of female sexual jouissance, that is, by allowing their
characters to experience intense sexual pleasure that appears to
98 : Sex and Power
carry the subject beyond language. In Cynthia Voigt’s On Fortune’s

Wheel (1990), Birle and Orien come together ‘‘as a man does to a
woman’’ and Birle is ‘‘not surprised to find in herself a hunger that
matched his’’ (241). The text only implies her jouissance, but when
she eventually bears his child, no stigma is attached to her fertility.
In fact, she rejoices at having a daughter, chooses to raise the child
on her own, and eventually reconciles herself to Orien’s perma-
nent presence in her life when he abdicates his kingdom to live
with her and their daughter.
Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Beginning Place (1980) contains a scene
of sexual jouissance more direct than the one depicted in On For-
tune’s Wheel, but as in that fantasy novel, the sexual climax follows
the characters’ triumph over the force of evil with which they have
been in conflict. Hugh and Irene have just slaughtered the terrible
creature that holds Tembreabrezi hostage:
He held her to him, but awkwardly and timidly, until she put
up both her arms, feeling herself go as soft and quick as water.
Then he held her and mounted on her, overcoming; yet her
strength held and contained his strength.
As he entered her, as she was entered, they came to climax
together, and then lay together, mixed and melded, breast
against breast and their breath mingled, until he rose in her
again and she closed on him, the long pulse of joy enacting
them. (169–170)
Le Guin takes pains in this passage to depict both characters’
sexual pleasure. That a ‘‘pulse of joy enact[s]’’ them implies that
their orgasms have some sort of reifying power to actually create
something else altogether new, although Hugh is the subject and
Irene the object of the construction, ‘‘as he entered her, as she was
entered’’ (169). At least neither character ends up dead, pregnant,
or abandoned.
In A House Like a Lotus, L’Engle also seems to know instinc-
tively that the pleasure/knowledge/power dynamic is integral to
our understanding of human sexuality. At sixteen, the protagonist,
Polly, is the eldest of seven children. An eccentric and rich artist
named Max befriends her, giving Polly new insights into artistic
culture and multiculturalism. Max is a complicated woman. After
the death of her baby daughter, Max and her husband divorced,
Sex and Power : 99
and Max established a permanent relationship with a surgeon

named Ursula. When Polly first learns that the woman she has
idolized is a lesbian, she reacts with a homophobia common
among teenagers in the 1980s. The girl tells herself that her anger
is a result of Max’s dishonesty, but the woman has never lied to
Polly, so the reader infers Polly’s extreme homophobia. Polly’s
fear demonstrates two loci of power: Max has hurt Polly and
Polly, in rejecting the friendship for a time, hurts her friend. That
dual loci exist becomes more important when later in the novel
Max gets drunk and makes sexual overtures to Polly. Polly runs
away, horrified, hurt, and disgusted by Max’s hypocrisy: Max has
already condemned her own father for sexually molesting his
daughter, Max’s sister. Since Max has repeatedly positioned Polly
as her daughter figure, the overture has such strongly incestuous
overtones that Polly almost permanently ends their friendship.
Much of the rest of the novel deals with the lessons Polly learns
about forgiveness. Max immediately recants in complete self-
abnegation. She is aware that she has abused her power in this
situation — but presumably, that was part of what made it excit-
ing to make a pass at Polly in the first place. The sexual predator
thrives on having power over a victim, and in this scene in which
Max bases her need for physical contact with Polly on a need for
‘‘an affirmation of being,’’ Max is predatory (187).
In the next flash of lightning she stood up, and in the long satin
gown she seemed seven feet tall, and she was swaying, so drunk
she couldn’t walk.
And then she fell . . .
I rolled out of the way. She reached for me, and she was
sobbing. (187, ellipses in the original)
Polly eventually forgives this breach of trust in part because of her
knowledge that Max is dying of a fatal tropical disease. If Max has
the power to establish a mother-daughter relationship and then
victimize her daughter figure, Polly also has power in this rela-
tionship: she elects to be a daughter figure, but she refuses to be
victimized. Eventually, it is she who has the power to main-
tain the relationship because she holds the power to forgive her
transgressor.
But another way that L’Engle depicts Polly’s power is with an
100 : Sex and Power
unusual expression of female jouissance. After Polly flees from

Max’s unwanted sexual advances, the girl goes to the home of a
medical intern she is dating named Renny. Her decision to have
sex with him is undoubtedly tied to her own need to affirm her
heterosexuality, but the passage is nevertheless the most poetic
rhetoric in the book:
Gentle. Not frightening. Knowing what he was doing. I felt my
nipples rise, and it startled me.
‘‘Shhh,’’ Renny whispered. ‘‘Shhh, it’s all right, don’t worry,
just relax and listen to your body.’’
He was slow, rhythmic, gentle, moving down my
body, down . . .
and I was nothing but my body
there was a sharp brief pain
brief
and then a sweet spasm went through me
and I seemed to rise into the air
no more pain
just the sweetness
the incredible
oh, the
and then Renny, panting
I pressed him hard against me. (260)
L’Engle’s effort to portray the ineffability of jouissance captures
something of the division Foucault tries to maintain between sex
and sexuality, with ‘‘sex’’ being the physical action and ‘‘sexuality’’
being the cultural forces (including language) used to regulate it.
The separation is, of course, an artificial one, as L’Engle’s use of
language to depict a lack of language demonstrates. Language is
inseparable from the action, as she well knows.
L’Engle also uses language to assert Polly’s agency in this scene.
Polly may initially be the object of Renny’s sexual advances and
she may be having sex with him out of her homophobic fear of
Max’s sexual overtures, but the teenager nevertheless claims a sub-
ject position with respect to her own body. She asserts her agency
during intercourse when she describes her nipples rising, then
her whole self rising, and again when she portrays herself in the
subject position during the completion of their lovemaking : ‘‘I
Sex and Power : 101
pressed him hard against me’’ (260).5 L’Engle’s careful articulation

of Polly’s sexual agency is an even stronger feminist statement
than her celebration of jouissance. Polly knows the power of her
sexuality because she perceives herself as an agent in the process
rather than as an object, as happens with so many female charac-
ters in ya novels. Polly’s pleasure, therefore, is based on her
knowledge of her own power.
Two friends Polly makes in Greece serve as foils to Max in
demonstrating that a young woman can have some choice and
therefore some power in her sexual relationships. Polly makes
friends with a bourgeois American teenager who tries to seduce
her. She eventually sees through his posturing when he puts both
of their lives at risk and she saves them from drowning. From this
point on, she refuses the sexual power he has over her because
she recognizes that sharing her sexuality with him would be self-
destructive. As in her relationship with Max, Polly has the power
to define the level of intimacy the two will share. Another friend
Polly makes, named Omio, has witnessed the abuse of power that
colonizing missionaries have had over the people in his homeland,
a Polynesian island. Omio teaches her that he has forgiven his
oppressors because ‘‘My father told me we must learn to love such
people, because they must be sick in their minds, and only love
could heal such sickness. When people have great power, lo, they
become very sick, and must be loved as we love those who are
dying’’ (256). But he also teaches Polly that people who are sexu-
ally attracted to one another can still have chaste friendships. Polly
feels physically drawn to Omio and feels shame when she discov-
ers that he is married. They decide to remain friends, and Polly
finds a certain serenity in learning that she can have a powerful
and platonic relationship that does not engage her sexuality. This
knowledge makes it possible for her to forgive Max: only after she
learns that she can love Omio without acting on her sexual im-
pulses does she trust Max’s promise that her mother figure will
never again act on her inappropriate sexual impulses.
L’Engle does not shy away from depicting the power of human
sexuality in relationships that may or may not appropriately in-
clude sexuality. Max has had consensual relations with both her
husband and her lover, but she is sexually drawn to her daughter
figure as Max’s father was drawn to his daughter. Polly has inter-
102 : Sex and Power
course with a man ten years older than she and is sexually attracted
to a married man. Yet she refuses to have sex with two people: her
mother figure and the narcissistic boy whom she knows will hurt
her. Ultimately, every configuration in the novel in which sexual
attraction is not mutual is depicted as destructive. If L’Engle has
an ideology it is not that female sexuality is destructive but that
sexual victimization is. The message may be a liberating one for
adolescent readers accustomed to the stigmatization of teen sexu-
ality, especially female sexuality.
Whether a novelist writing for adolescents depicts sexuality as
a matter of pleasure or displeasure, however, the depiction itself
is usually a locus of power for the adolescent. Characters who
have explored their sexuality usually learn something from the ex-
perience, which is why sex is a rite of passage in so many adoles-
cent novels. This tendency to link sexuality with maturation has a
certain didactic impulse to it: as long as the adolescent learns
something from the experience, then the literary representation of
sexuality seems more acceptable within a genre dedicated to teach-
ing adolescents how to become the Other — an adult. Ultimately,
the connection between sexuality as a site of power, knowledge,
and pleasure proves to be one more occasion for ideological in-
doctrination in the genre.
Queer Discourse
Nonheterosexual teen romances employ a different set of ide-

ologies that are meant to empower queer teenagers.6 Although
novels about gay males and lesbians are often more different
than they are alike, they share a tendency to address how teenagers
are affected when they develop their sexuality oppressed because
of their orientation. This oppression of queerness exemplifies
one obvious site of power being limited in adolescent literature.
The novels are also revelatory for the ways that they highlight a
physical act — sex — being transformed by discourse into sexu-
ality, which Foucault insists pervades the culture (Power 190; His-
tory 106).
Such ya novels about gay males as Aidan Chambers’s Dance on
My Grave and Francesca Lia Block’s Baby Be-Bop are very Foucaul-
Sex and Power : 103
dian in their tendency to privilege the discourse of homosexuality

over the physical sexual acts of gay men, defining homosexuality
more rhetorically than physically. Themselves entirely constructed
by language, these novels fall prey to the same chicken-and-egg
dilemma that plagues Foucault’s work: which comes first, the
body or the word? In and of itself, this paradox would not neces-
sarily be problematic except for the fact that all too often the
rhetoric these texts employ to construct gay discourse is more re-
pressive than liberating.
Homosexuality, of course, is one of the many aspects of sexu-
ality that Western institutions such as the church and psychoanaly-
sis have defined as abnormal in an attempt to control this un-
wieldy force that is human sexuality (Foucault, History 42– 44).
But because power and repression are such fluid constructs, even-
tually ‘‘homosexuality began to speak in its own behalf, to demand
that its legitimacy or ‘naturality’ be acknowledged, often in the
same vocabulary, using the same categories by which it was med-
ically disqualified’’ (History 101). Although Judith Butler has criti-
cized Foucault for minimizing the importance of sexual difference
(Gender Trouble xxii, 31), queer theorist Jonathan Dollimore notes
that at least Foucault’s identification of homosexuality as a discur-
sive construct was one of the factors that helped Euro-American
culture move beyond thinking of being gay only in terms of bi-
naries like ‘‘normal’’ and ‘‘deviant’’ (179). As Foucault explains dis-
cursive constructs such as sexuality, ‘‘There is not, on the one
side, a discourse of power, and opposite it, another discourse that
runs counter to it. . . . there can exist different and even contradic-
tory discourses within the same strategy’’ (History 101–102). This,
then, is what I wish to explore in this section: queer discourse in
young adult literature creates contradictory discourses because of
the way sexuality is defined by the relationship between power,
knowledge, and pleasure. The characters’ physical pleasure is often
undermined by their knowledge of homophobia, so their ability
to enjoy their sexual power is limited.
The male adolescent character who has sexual contact with an-
other male in a ya novel illustrates clearly the Foucauldian concept
that sexuality is informed by the relationship between discourse
and power because many gay ya male novels use a gay character
to illustrate how the issues of pain and pleasure inherent in human
104 : Sex and Power
sexuality are discursively formed. Together, pain and pleasure

fashion a matrix of power in which each of the gay characters in
these novels functions. Even when authors depict teenagers who
are aware that discourse fashions their sexuality, these authors self-
censor their gay male characters. What gay and lesbian ya novels
tend to demonstrate, then, is the limits of queer discourse at work
in adolescent literature: as a group they show how a genre can
become more self-aware of a social issue without necessarily pro-
viding the reader with progressively transformative experiences.
Christine Jenkins’s ‘‘Heartthrobs and Heartbreaks: A Guide to
Young Adult Books with Gay Themes’’ is an annotated bibliog-
raphy of gay and lesbian novels published from 1969 to 1988. Al-
though Jenkins does not analyze discursive tensions in these nov-
els, she does classify the stereotypes to be found in the first twenty
years of gay ya literature as she sees them: the stereotypical ya gay
male is financially secure, attractive, and white; he lives on one of
the coasts, loves the arts, has a troubled family, and has difficulty
recovering from the loss of his first love. His sex acts are rarely
described with any kind of detail; that is, he is often denied physi-
cal pleasure (82– 85). I might add that he is often an only child:
three of the four principal gay male characters in the novels under
discussion here have no brothers or sisters, which reinforces their
isolation. Jenkins cites John Donovan’s I’ll Get There. It Better Be
Worth the Trip. (1969) as the first ya novel to treat gay issues openly.
This novel certainly fulfills all of the stereotypes that Jenkins iden-
tifies, plus a few more, not least of which is that the protagonist,
Davy, has an overbearing, alcoholic mother who does not under-
stand him. In other words, his family is troubled almost entirely
because of his mother’s narcissism; the novel implies that Davy’s
mother has somehow driven him to homosexual sex.
Aidan Chambers’s Dance on My Grave perpetuates some of the
same stereotypes: one of the gay characters has a terrifically over-
bearing mother; both gay characters are white, middle-class, single
children. The novel, however, uses discourse that celebrates gay
pleasure to a certain degree. But as its title indicates, the book is
more about death than about homosexuality, despite its Library of
Congress designation ‘‘[1. Homosexuality — Fiction. 2. Death—
Fiction].’’ Being gay is not Hal Robinson’s problem (in the sense
of the typical problem novel, which this book most emphatically
Sex and Power : 105
is not); grief over the death of Barry Gorman, Hal’s lover, is. Nev-
ertheless, the pain and pleasure of sexuality are discursive issues
in this novel because Hal is a character fascinated with language.
The starting point of Dance on My Grave is Hal’s explanation to
a court-appointed social worker in his hometown, a British sea-
side resort named Southend, about why he was arrested for dese-
crating Barry’s grave. Hal and his lover made an oath before
Barry’s death that whoever survived would dance on the other’s
grave. Hal writes the story both as an explanation to his social
worker and to mitigate his grief. Several passages demonstrate his
awareness that he — and everyone — is discursively formed: he
discusses with one of his friends that ‘‘we invent the people we
know. . . . Perhaps we even invent ourselves’’ (246). The epigraph
from the first chapter is a quotation from Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaugh-
terhouse-Five that focuses the reader’s attention on this point: ‘‘ We
are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend
to be.’’ Moreover, Hal tells his social worker that the process of
writing his story has been more important than actually living it:
‘‘I have become my own character. . . . Writing the story is what
has changed me; not having lived through the story’’ (221).
Hal knows that discourse is power. And he also knows that
discourse and knowledge are inseparable. As Kirk Fuoss notes,
Hal is Foucauldian in recognizing that ‘‘desire . . . not only pre-
cedes but also exceeds language’’ (171). Hal is frustrated by his
inability to put his knowledge of his desire for Barry into words.
In the early stage of his romance with Barry, Hal comments that
verbalizing their feelings reifies their relationship; it only becomes
real once they have discussed it: ‘‘knowledge is power. Once
somebody knows that about you — knows how you really feel
about them —once you’ve declared yourself, then they know
about you, have power over you. Can make claims on you’’ (83).
It is the act of enunciation — not the act of sex — that gives the
relationship ontological status.
Sex with Barry does bring Hal physical and emotional pleasure,
however, and the discourse of the novel is very direct in commu-
nicating that. Falling in love with Barry satisfies the ‘‘desire for a
bosom buddy’’ Hal has felt since he was seven years old (44).
Chambers does not shy away from describing the boys’ first kiss
or their frequent caresses, although in keeping with the unwritten
106 : Sex and Power
publishing codes that dominate the production of ya literature,

the adolescents’ genital sex acts are alluded to only interstitially.
But at least Hal’s euphemisms are humorous; when they finally
have genital contact, Hal quips, ‘‘[Barry] gave me a present from
Southend. Wish you were here?’’ (149). Even so, Hal implies that
the emotional pleasure he takes from their relationship is far more
important to him than are the sex acts. He lovingly describes their
conversations and their activities:
all I knew for certain was that I couldn’t get enough of him. I
wanted to be with him all the time. And yet when I was with
him that wasn’t enough either. I wanted to look at him and
touch him and have him touch me and hear him talk and tell
him things and do things together with him. All the time. Day
and night. (155)
But eventually Barry reacts to Hal’s obsessive pleasure in their
relationship, telling Hal: ‘‘It’s not what we do together that you
want. It’s me. All of me. All for yourself. And that’s too heavy for
me, Hal. I don’t want to be owned, and I don’t want to be sucked
dry. Not by anyone. Ever’’ (179). They are Barry’s last words to
his lover. Within an hour Barry dies in a motorcycle accident.
Hal’s pleasure has been Barry’s pain; now that pleasure is trans-
formed into Hal’s own pain.
One major purpose of Dance on My Grave is to communicate
that obsessive love is not healthy, regardless of one’s sexual ori-
entation. But Chambers also communicates both that sexuality is
inseparable from a pleasure/pain dynamic and that discourse is
power. It seems to me that Chambers knows his Foucault well.
Nevertheless, Dance on My Grave contains an almost Calvinistic se-
ries of messages about homosexuality. For example, Hal spends
more time describing his first lover as ‘‘cactal and overpowering’’
than he does describing his own physical or emotional pleasure
(51). And even though Hal never expresses remorse, shame, or
even confusion about being gay, he is still forced to dress as a girl
and pose as Barry’s girlfriend if he wants to see his lover’s body in
the morgue; Hal is still denied a photograph of his lover by Barry’s
mother, who — not incidentally — has an ‘‘overactive Id’’ (35); he
is still arrested for fulfilling his oath to his lover when he dances
on Barry’s grave. And worst of all, his father almost certainly per-
Sex and Power : 107
ceives his sexual orientation as pathological: ‘‘I can hear in the

tone of [my father’s] voice: he was saying, ‘ What I think you need
the doctor can’t do anything about’ ’’ (240). Perhaps these scenes
in the novel accurately reflect what it meant to be gay in the 1980s,
but it does seem to me unfortunate that despite Chambers’s affir-
mative rhetoric about being gay, he still focuses more on Hal’s
pain than on his pleasure. But at least Hal denies neither the reader
nor himself knowledge about how central his orientation is to his
identity.
As in Dance on My Grave, Francesca Lia Block’s Baby Be-Bop self-
consciously constructs sexuality as a discursive process, but then,
given how metafictional all of Block’s novels are, this is no real
surprise. The story is a prequel to Weetzie Bat ; in it, Weetzie’s
friend Dirk comes to understand and accept his sexuality. Dirk
and his best friend, Pup, love each other deeply, but Pup homo-
phobically rejects his obvious feelings for Dirk and abandons their
friendship. Dirk — like so many gay ya protagonists — feels far
more pain than pleasure in this novel, although he never denies
his knowledge of the pleasure he takes in his orientation.
After Pup’s rejection, however, Dirk falls into a tailspin that
culminates in a painful near-death experience. As he lies ill, the
genie in his grandmother’s lamp (the same one who grants Weetzie
her three wishes in Weetzie Bat ) shows Dirk his forebears’ stories.
He learns that his great-grandmother had his grandmother, Fifi,
out of wedlock; he learns about Fifi’s love for her husband and of
his parents’ consuming passion for each other. Each of these three
embedded narratives is a symphony of the relationship between
pain and pleasure for those who love: Fifi’s husband, for example,
knows he is dying, so he directs all of his love to her and ignores
their son, who subsequently grows up not knowing how to love
his son until after his own death. The ghost of Dirk’s father urges
the boy to be different, not to give up on life (or his sexuality)
when it causes him pain:
‘‘I want you to fight. I love you, buddy. I want you not to be
afraid.’’
‘‘But I’m gay,’’ Dirk said. ‘‘Dad, I’m gay.’’
‘‘I know you are, buddy,’’ Dirby said. And his lullaby eyes
sang with love. ‘‘Do you know about the Greek Gods, prob-
108 : Sex and Power
ably Walt Whitman — first beat father, Oscar Wilde, Ginsberg,

even, maybe, your number one hero? You can’t be afraid.’’ (86)
Dirk is an unusual character in that he can come out to his parents

without shame, an important discursive act of enunciation in a ya
novel. Moreover, since myth is entirely language based and the
three historical figures Dirk’s father names are all writers, the cata-
log of gay forefathers that Dirk’s father lists provides Dirk with a
heritage that is discursively situated. But the power of his father’s
acceptance is somewhat attenuated by the fact that Dirk can come
out to his father only after the man is dead.
Despite this, the novel promises Dirk happiness: the genie
shows him the future and the hope of his relationship with Duck.
Dirk’s pleasure with Duck may be deferred, but at least he will
have it eventually: ‘‘ When they first kiss, there on the beach, they
will kneel at the edge of the Pacific and say a prayer of thanks,
sending all the stories of love inside them out in a fleet of bottles
all across the oceans of the world’’ (103–104). Dirk and Duck’s
love — and their sexual pleasure — is treated as sacred in this text.
In the most metafictional passage of the text, Dirk asks the
genie why he has appeared. The genie answers:
Think about the word destroy. . . . Do you know what it is? De-
story. Destroy. Destory. You see. And restore. That’s re-story.
Do you know that only two things have been proven to help
survivors of the Holocaust? Massage is one. Telling their story
is another. Being touched and touching. Telling your story is
touching. It sets you free. (104)
The ‘‘ye shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free’’
theme is blatant, but in a genre that tends to suppress positive
homosexual discourses, this openness is welcome.
But the pain-pleasure matrix surrounding being gay is still com-
plex in this narrative. Dirk’s father, for instance, characterizes ho-
mosexuality in terms of fear, in terms of repression, not in terms
of passion or pleasure or freedom. The most important message
he has for Dirk is not to fear. Although that may be a message all
adolescents — and especially gay/ lesbian ones — need to hear, it
is not exactly a joyous proclamation or even very positive rhetoric.
Moreover, although the text affirms Dirk’s orientation, Baby Be-
Sex and Power : 109
Bop never shows him engaged in a loving relationship; readers

have to refer back to Weetzie Bat before they can read about Dirk
and Duck’s relationship. The only positive gay sex enacted in this
novel occurs in Dirk’s vision of his future with Duck. Before
Duck meets Dirk, ‘‘he never talked to the men he touched in bath-
rooms and parks and cars. Is this what it means to be gay? Duck
wondered. He missed the clean, quiet beaches of Santa Cruz,’’
even though he has left Santa Cruz because it is such a homopho-
bic community (100 –101). Block sends a clear message that gay
sex is not acceptable unless it is accompanied by love. She sepa-
rates the physical act of ‘‘sex’’ from ‘‘sexuality’’ as a discursive con-
struct in what Foucault considers typical Western fashion (Power
190; History 106). Human sexuality explored within a relationship
is far more acceptable in this novel than the simple act of sex by
itself is. But since sexual love can be painful and pleasurable
whether it is homosexual or heterosexual, perhaps Block is simply
being realistic.
The rhetoric begins to seem ominous, however, when the genie
compares homosexuality to the Holocaust. The discourse is remi-
niscent of Hal’s father implying that his son needs to be ‘‘cured’’
in Dance on My Grave. Block and Chambers have fallen into the
language of pathology. Bergman notes that ‘‘all three of the ways
in which patriarchy has conceived of homosexuality — as sin,
crime, and disease — place it within frameworks that deny it per-
manence since sins may be overcome, crimes avoided, and dis-
eases cured’’ (37). Chambers’s and Block’s rhetorical choices imply
the perpetuation of such patriarchal notions even while they try
to communicate to readers that being homosexual is not a dis-
ease, not a simple matter of choice, not a matter of victimization.
So why the rhetorical choices evoking pathology? It seems virtu-
ally impossible for ya authors — even those with the best inten-
tions — to escape from the hegemony of heterosexist discourse.
Lesbian ya novels display some of the same tendencies, espe-
cially in the way that they interrogate discourse by raising the ques-
tion of audience. Are such books as M. E. Kerr’s Deliver Us from
Evie intended for lesbian readers? For straight readers? For female
readers? For all readers? Elizabeth A. Ford notes the tendency of
some literary critics to assume that books about the lesbian or gay
teenager ‘‘are only for those directly ( physically?) involved in the
110 : Sex and Power
issues’’ (132, emphasis in the original). Moreover, if the text de-

scribes gay or lesbian acts, they are usually described in language
that endeavors to normalize them. That is, the texts strive to re-
assure readers that gay or lesbian sex is not toxic or abnormal or
even unusual. The very fact that the text implies that the act needs
normalizing carries with it the same ideological implication that
institutional discourses prohibiting heterosexual teenage inter-
course carry: that which is already societally sanctioned, chastity,
hardly needs normalizing.
Vanessa Wayne Lee therefore classifies lesbian novels into three
categories. Stories that assume that lesbianism needs to be nor-
malized and so seem to be glorified informational books she calls
‘‘education’’ texts (154), those that explore ‘‘the formation of les-
bian identity’’ (152) she calls ‘‘coming-out’’ books (154), and those
that ‘‘interrogate received wisdom about lesbianism and lesbian
identity’’ (152), she calls ‘‘postmodern’’ for the ways that they ‘‘de-
center, while problematizing, issues of information and identity’’
(158). These last are more likely to be marketed to adults than
adolescents and so are beyond the scope of this current study.
Lee’s classification system, however, is useful in providing a para-
digm for investigating how the discourses of pain and pleasure are
manipulated by cultural discourses in novels with heterodox ide-
ologies that are marketed to teenagers.
M. E. Kerr’s Deliver Us from Evie falls into the category that Lee
describes as educational (152) in that it attempts to normalize les-
bianism by defining it in nonthreatening terms. The book is nar-
rated by Parr Burrman, an adolescent farm boy who describes his
sister Evie’s coming out. Adult perceptions serve as the source of
stereotypes that need correcting throughout the novel. For ex-
ample, Evie’s mother nags her to wear more feminine clothing.
Eventually, Mrs. Burrman acknowledges that changing Evie’s ex-
terior will not change her interior, although as a mother, she still
wishes her daughter would not perpetuate stereotypes about les-
bians. Mrs. Burrman also suspects that Evie’s lover is a lesbian
because her mother is an alcoholic. Moreover, Mr. and Mrs. Burr-
man think that their daughter’s lesbianism is a phase, and their
farmhand, who wants to marry Evie so that he can control the
farm, delegitimizes lesbianism when he says, ‘‘it’s not serious
enough to be a sin. It’s kid stuff. Two women is . . . Now two
Sex and Power : 111
men — that’s another matter. That’s sin in the Bible’’ (101, ellipses
in the original). Presumably, Kerr hints at the man’s eroticization
of lesbianism in what Lee refers to as a typical heterosexist ten-
dency to consider lesbianism ‘‘as a facet of male heterosexual plea-
sure’’ (152). But the farmhand is an adult who, like the narrator’s
parents, constructs lesbianism either in terms of its being transi-
tory or its being pathological.
The narrator disagrees with his girlfriend’s attempts to paint
lesbianism as morally wrong when she attributes local flooding
to God’s wrath invoked on those who support lesbians. Evie’s
strongest statement describing her lesbianism reads: ‘‘I know you
so-called normal people would like it better if we looked as much
like all of you as possible, but some of us don’t, can’t, and never
will! And some others of us go for the ones who don’t, can’t and
never will’’ (86). Her proclamation confirms the ideology ‘‘that
lesbianism exists, whether the reader . . . likes it or not’’ (Lee 154).
Ultimately, the narrator parallels his love for his girlfriend with
Evie and Patsy’s love; the text concludes with a predictably for-
mulaic theme that love is love, no matter what. This is an attempt
at normalizing lesbianism that operates by flattening the differ-
ences between hetero- and homosexual relationships. Kerr’s in-
ability to depict lesbianism in terms other than ‘‘see, it’s just like
being straight’’ undermines her good intentions of instructing
readers to perceive all the stereotypes perpetuated in this book as
wrong.
Evie’s initial discussions about her lesbianism revolve around
the utterance of the concept ‘‘lesbian.’’ Only once Evie self-
identifies as lesbian, only when she proclaims her queerness and
annunciates and affirms her identity, does she begin to seem
happy. Moreover, she tells her parents to disregard other people’s
utterances about lesbianism, saying that she admires a lesbian
singer precisely because ‘‘she doesn’t care what people say about
her’’ (57). Moments later she tells her father, ‘‘I don’t give a ding-
dong-damn what people say about me’’ (58). Evie understands the
importance of language, especially the importance of not giving
other people power to diminish her with their words. Later, Patsy
Duff’s father threatens the Burrmans with legal sanctions, imply-
ing that Evie and Patsy’s relationship breaks laws about leading
minors astray. Mr. Duff intuitively knows that more is at stake
112 : Sex and Power
than a physical relationship, so he seeks protection from the threat

he feels by invoking a legal system that codifies sexual behavior.
Evie and Patsy reject his discursive, authoritarian attempt to regu-
late their sexuality when they run away to New York. Despite en-
gaging numerous stereotypes — or even, perhaps, because it is so
stereotypical — Deliver Us from Evie demonstrates how human
sexuality is inevitably regulated by discourse, such as legal or reli-
gious rhetoric.
Deliver Us from Evie attempts to educate the reader that lesbi-
anism is not external, it is not a phase, it is not the result of bad
parenting, it does not exist as a function of serving male erotic
pleasure, it is not a sin. The novel also functions within cultural
assumptions about the power of language to regulate a physical
activity. But the one thing Deliver Us from Evie fails to do is to
indicate any source of lesbian pleasure. Evie’s poetry about her
lover is described, but the legitimacy of her eroticism is not (al-
though her brother’s is, in a heavy-petting scene with his girl-
friend). Deliver Us from Evie is thus representative of a whole cate-
gory of books in which lesbian knowledge of sexual power is as
divorced from pleasure as it is in many books about heterosexual
jouissance.
If Deliver Us from Evie is an educational novel about lesbianism,
Nancy Garden’s Good Moon Rising is a lesbian coming-out novel.
Jan and Kerry fall in love while working on a production of The
Crucible. Jan thinks of their first kiss, ‘‘as if she were waking out of
a long sleep into something new and wonderful — scary too’’ (76).
But their sexual contact has brought the two girls both joy and
power, ‘‘[ Jan] felt suddenly elated, strong, powerful. . . . with
Kerry beside her, with Kerry having touched her, kissed her’’ (77).
Garden does not avoid describing their first kiss or subsequent
sexual contact in some detail: ‘‘Jan touched Kerry gently wherever
Kerry touched her, wanting to feel what Kerry felt as well as what
she herself felt; it was as if her body had been waiting for this all
its life and hers, as if it were suddenly coming alive on its own. It
was wonderful and terrifying at the same time’’ (147). Jan’s Carte-
sian mind/body split captures something of the duality inherent
in Foucault’s identification of the Western separation between sex
and sexuality. Her body feels things her mind can only reflect
upon as if it were not participating, as if it were possible for her
Sex and Power : 113
body to experience sexual excitement without any influence from

her brain. Moreover, she has internalized contradictory feelings
about her sexuality: the power she feels is both pleasurable and
frightening.
Jan and Kerry explore their lesbian identities and decide they
are comfortable with them — until they are outed by their peers.
At this point, the book begins to interrogate the construction of
lesbianism in ways that allow for its eventual celebration. The two
girls do not proclaim their orientation until after they have pub-
licly disavowed it. But because knowledge of their lesbianism
brings both Jan and Kerry pleasure, they eventually affirm that
pleasure in front of their peers and feel as a result more fully em-
powered. Jan quits lying about her orientation at a party when she
tells her friends, ‘‘I am gay,’’ and she feels stronger immediately:
‘‘ With the words came a sense of relief and liberation so great that
she felt she never wanted to hide again, even though she knew at
the same time that she might have to’’ (221). Garden’s text cap-
tures succinctly the dual nature of sexual pleasure that Foucault
identifies: Jan refuses and accepts repression in the same sentence.
Language, not physical activity, determines Jan’s sense of identity.
Lesbianism, then, in this novel is as discursively informed as it is
in Deliver Us from Evie.
Queer ya novels often imply that they will engage in a dis-
course with bibliotherapeutic intent: readers — queer, bisexual, or
straight — should feel a sense of catharsis or validation or accep-
tance of homosexuality after reading such novels. The assumption
seems to be that readers need this bibliotherapy, one way or an-
other. No wonder the genre has a well-entrenched tradition of
delegitimizing its own agenda. But in an ironic twist, in being un-
able to avoid the duality of repression and liberation, queer ya
novels do consistently normalize queer sexuality in at least one
way. Foucault claims that our culture is unable to separate sexu-
ality from discourses of pain and pleasure. In that sense, then,
Dance on My Grave, Baby Be-Bop, Deliver Us from Evie, and Good Moon
Rising do in some way affirm queer sexuality, for these books de-
pict it in the discursive mixture of pleasure and pain typical of any
description of human sexuality.
As Kirk Fuoss points out, ‘‘Because ya texts dealing with homo-
sexuality are embedded in a complex network of power relations,
114 : Sex and Power
no single agent of power is exclusively responsible for the deploy-

ment of strategies’’ that ya authors use in developing the genre
(171). But the discourse in these novels does determine the issues
of power surrounding homosexuality; discourse all too often is
power here: ‘‘Discourse transmits and produces power; it rein-
forces it, but also undermines and exposes it, renders it fragile and
makes it possible to thwart it’’ (Foucault, History 101). It is not so
much the affirmation of homosexuality or lesbianism, or even the
incipient delegitimization, that matters in these novels. Rather, it
is the fluid discourse between these two poles, the way knowledge
of homosexuality or lesbianism produces both pain and pleasure,
that needs investigation; it is the power of discourse to determine
these characters’ sense of sexuality and even sense of self that is
most likely to affect the adolescent reader.
All of the characters who are exploring their sexuality in these
novels do so discursively. That is, the conversations and the word
choices they use to define their orientation matter far more than
their actions do. Sex, after all, is largely interstitial in these novels.
But sexuality, that is another matter. Hal self-consciously uses dis-
course to explore his feelings for his lover in Dance on My Grave.
He recognizes himself as discursively formed when he says that
writing his story is what has changed him, not living his life. Baby
Be-Bop has a similar self-consciousness about language: the genie
specifically instructs Dirk to tell his story, to be the teller of his
own story, for it is in the restorying process that power is restored
to the marginalized. Evie and her lover Patsy reject their parents’
attempts to discursively regulate them by living in an environment
that allows them freedom from repression in Deliver Us from Evie.
And the focus of Jan and Kerry’s self-identification as lesbians is
not their lovemaking, it is their public proclamation of the fact
that they are queer. Words matter far more than actions in their
eventual self-affirmation. Given that literary characters are always
already and only discursive constructs, the discursive nature of
lesbianism and homosexuality in these novels may be unavoidable.
But it is important to note that these novels parallel Foucault’s
flawed conception of sexuality as primarily discursive. Denying
the corporeality of homosexuality too easily divorces it from plea-
sure, which potentially disempowers gay sexuality.
In any event, all four of these ya novels rely on discourse as a
Sex and Power : 115
form of power; the two more overtly influenced by postmodern-

ism — Dance on My Grave and Baby Be-Bop — directly communi-
cate to the reader that power is defined by discourse. These
books all assume at some level a premise central to aids aware-
ness: silence equals death. Words equal empowerment. As a genre,
then, queer ya literature necessitates the study of discourse be-
cause it is frequently predicated on the foundation that human
sexuality is determined by discourse and that discourse is power.
Foucault’s work is most useful to us in the study of queer ya lit-
erature if we use his theories to understand the ways in which the
discourse of sexuality in Western tradition has influenced the de-
piction of gay sexuality. Even if the genre has developed a sense
of self-awareness, its largely negative rhetoric still denies the vali-
dation one might wish to find in ya novels about being gay.
ya novels about queer characters often expose sexuality as a

discursive concept, as an act that is regulated more by language
than by any biological factor. But whether ya novels involve
straight characters, gay characters, or both, sexuality serves as a
prominent site of power for the adolescents in these books, pre-
cisely because it is regulated by language. Adolescents use their
sexuality to attract other people, to dominate other people, to sub-
mit to other people, to enjoy other people, to manipulate other
people, to communicate with other people — in short, sexuality
is a way for them to engage the Other. Discovering their sexual-
ity is powerful to adolescents because it represents a new forum
in which to interact with the Other. Jouissance, especially, brings
with it at least the temporary illusion of unifying the Self and the
Other, of an Imaginary healing of the division created by the sub-
ject’s entrance into the Symbolic Order. The division of the Self
from the Other necessitated by language at once creates the inevi-
tability of sexuality as a discursive construct and brings with it the
power (and pleasure) of knowing the Other. Perhaps this is why
experiencing sex serves as a rite of passage for so many teenagers.
The experience of sexuality may indeed mark a new level of dis-
cursive consciousness for adolescents struggling to understand
the distinction between themselves and the Others who constitute
the society in which they must live.
Sometimes, teenage characters in adolescent literature are em-
116 : Sex and Power
powered by their newfound knowledge of and pleasure in nego-

tiating with the Other by using sexuality as the currency of inter-
action, but more often adolescents are disempowered by the
consequences of their sexual actions. In other words, sexuality is
a source of power and pleasure for many adolescents in ya novels,
yet more novelists are comfortable portraying sexuality in terms
of displeasure than pleasure. The novelists who do so seem to be
reinforcing the dynamic of authority within adolescent literature
that reminds adolescents of their place within the power structure.
Sex may be one of the first times they become aware of their own
power — but negative depictions of human sexuality provide the
author with an occasion to remind the adolescent not to become
too powerful, not to become too enamored with their knowledge
of pleasure. Because adults are quite conscious of sexuality as a
source of power, they frequently subject adolescent readers to
very consistent ideologies that attempt to regulate teen sexuality
by repressing it. Much of the discourse that creates human sexu-
ality is designed to do exactly that: discourse creates and subse-
quently regulates sexuality as it does all forms of human power.
chapter 5
‘‘When I can control the focus’’

death and narrative resolution
in adolescent literature
Death in the Young Adult Novel
n Chapter 4, I discussed Foucault’s concept of sexuality as
I a human construct invented to control the biological as-

pects of sex (History 35). Death is another biological im-
perative. It is, perhaps, even more powerful in the human
mind than sexuality, for although in theory some individuals can
live asexually, no one avoids death. Moreover, humans have cre-
ated numerous institutions surrounding the biological reality of
death to help them control its power: most religions, for example,
have institutional investments in explaining death to people. For
many adolescents, trying to understand death is as much of a rite
of passage as experiencing sexuality is.
The standard interpretation of The Catcher in the Rye provides a
noteworthy example: Playing the antiestablishment antihero in a
picaresque set in New York, Holden wears a red hat to invoke his
dead brother’s memory; Allie, who has died of leukemia, was a
redhead. Holden wants to be a catcher in the rye because he wants
to keep children like his classmate James Castle, who has jumped
to his death from a dormitory window, from falling into death.
Holden does not begin to heal spiritually until he watches his little
sister riding a merry-go-round (symbolic, perhaps, of the life cycle)
and recognizes that he has to let her take chances, including the
chance that she might die. He cannot catch her — or anyone — to
prevent her death.
Two of the first Entwicklungsromane directly marketed to young
adults in the 1960s are similarly focused on death: Ponyboy in The
Outsiders and John and Lorraine in The Pigman work through their
grief about a friend’s death by writing their stories. Children’s and
adolescent novels including Bridge to Terabithia (1977) and Toning the
118 : Death and Resolution
Sweep demonstrate characters working through the five stages of

grief that Elisabeth Kübler-Ross identifies: denial, anger, guilt, de-
pression, acceptance. Death and grief are, indeed, common topics
in this literature.
The greatest difference between how death is portrayed in chil-
dren’s and adolescent literature, however, lies perhaps in the use
to which death is put in the literary text. According to Karen
Coats, children’s literature is very much defined by children learn-
ing to separate from their parents (‘‘Lacan with Runt Pigs’’ 116–
120). Books from The Runaway Bunny to Harriet the Spy demonstrate
children learning to individuate by separating from their actual or
symbolic parents. Many children’s books are about death: Char-
lotte’s Web and Tuck Everlasting are two important examples. But in
both of these books (and in many children’s books about death),
death is portrayed as part of a cycle, as an ongoing process of life.
Learning about death seems to be a stage in the child’s process of
separating from the parent more than anything else. Wilbur, for
example, becomes an adult only after death separates him from
his mother figure, Charlotte; Winnie Foster in Tuck Everlasting ma-
tures most in the incident in which she chooses to separate from
her actual parents. Although her friends the Tucks will never die,
she herself chooses death, in a symbolic separation from her
mother figure, Mae Tuck, when she refuses to drink the water that
could make her immortal.
Mortality, however, has a different purpose in adolescent litera-
ture. In this genre, protagonists come to understand that death is
more than a symbolic separation from the parent. Acknowledging
death is more than a stage necessary toward growing up and away
from one’s parents. Death in adolescent literature is a threat, an
experience adolescents understand as a finality. Few adolescent
novels use the cycle imagery that dominates books like Tuck Ever-
lasting and Charlotte’s Web because the Bildungsroman formula man-
dates a plot determined by the concept of growth as linear: death
is the endpoint of that line. Adolescent literature thus sustains nar-
rative investigations into death that are more than symbolic jour-
neys into separation from the parent. Indeed, I would submit that
death is the sine qua non of adolescent literature, the defining fac-
tor that distinguishes it both from children’s and adult literature.
In children’s literature, learning about death symbolizes a degree
Death and Resolution : 119
of separation from one’s parents; adult literature confronts death

from such a variety of intricate perspectives that it seems difficult
to trace a pattern on the topic. But in adolescent literature, death
is often depicted in terms of maturation when the protagonist ac-
cepts the permanence of mortality, when s/he accepts herself as
Being-towards-death.1 Little Women provides an example: in the
first half of the novel, Jo fears death and learns a healthy respect
for it, but in the second half, Jo’s life experiences are determined
by the death of her sister. She makes the decisions she makes
about her work and her love life because of the permanent rupture
in her life caused by her sister’s death. Beth’s death is important
not only for how it causes Jo to acknowledge her separateness
from her sister. Certainly, Beth’s death does lead Jo to that recog-
nition. But Beth’s death also influences Jo’s maturation. She re-
turns to her family; she writes in a different voice; and she marries
a man inconceivable to her in the first book of the text. Jo learns
about death, but even more, she works through her grief and dis-
covers a way to accommodate her grief by living her life in ways
that acknowledge both her pain at losing a loved one and her
awareness of her own mortality.
Acceptance of losing others and awareness of mortality shape
much of the discourse surrounding death in ya novels. Both ac-
ceptance and awareness serve in the power/knowledge dynamic
to render the adolescent both powerless in her fear of death and
empowered by acknowledging its power. Adolescents often gain
their first knowledge of the pain permanent separation involves
when they feel powerless because someone they love dies; the cor-
ollary that inevitably follows is adolescents’ recognition of their
own mortality. If my brother Allie is dead, then I, Holden, will
also be dead some day. In the calm that follows the emotional
storm, adolescent characters usually seem more empowered than
they did when they still denied death’s power, as Holden Caul-
field’s narrative demonstrates. It seems that death has far more
power over the adolescent imagination than any human institu-
tion possibly could. Thus, I will first discuss how the resulting
acceptance and awareness of this power leads to at least three re-
curring patterns surrounding the depiction of death in ya novels.
Then I will examine how death is tied to issues of subjectivity and
objectivity by exploring how authors of ya novels including Lois
Lowry, Francesca Lia Block, and Trudy Krisher use photography

to explore Being-towards-death. Finally, I will investigate how
Being-towards-death is implicated in narrative structure in these
novels in a complex fusion of theme and structure.
death occurs onstage

In many children’s novels, characters such as Charlotte die off-
stage, and their death is reported by indirect narration or in the
speech of another character. Death in the ya novel is far more
immediate. When Johnny kills a Soc, Bob, in The Outsiders, the text
describes Bob’s corpse unflinchingly. Later, Ponyboy describes
watching Johnny die. The reader is not protected from either
death by the filter of indirect narration. Jamal watches his friend
Tito shoot a gang member during a robbery in Scorpions. Adam
Farmer witnesses his parents’ death in I Am the Cheese. In Karen
Hesse’s Out of the Dust (1997), Billie Joe tells the reader directly,
‘‘Ma died that day / giving birth to my brother’’ (69). She describes
her mother’s funeral, too, in language that does not flinch from
death: ‘‘They wrapped my baby brother in a blanket / and placed
him in Ma’s bandaged arms. / We buried them together’’ (70).
This confrontation with death seems essential for adolescents to
gain knowledge of death’s power and of their own powerlessness
over it.
death is unt imely, violent, and unnecessary

Part of what seems to force many adolescent characters into
their recognition of death’s power is the seemingly gratuitous na-
ture of some deaths. More children’s novels deal with the elderly
dying than with children or teenagers dying, but in ya novels,
adolescents learn about their own mortality by witnessing the
death of someone who is not necessarily going gently into that
good night. Myers’s Scorpions illustrates this phenomenon with its
graphic message about the results of gang activity. In that novel
Jamal’s friend Tito kills another teenager to protect Jamal’s life.
Jamal learns from watching Tito’s pain that life is hard and cold
(215–216). In Toning the Sweep, Emily learns that her grandfather
was lynched as a young man while she reconciles herself to her
grandmother’s premature death from cancer. In Lyddie, the pro-
tagonist’s mother and sister die deaths that result, at least in part,
from inadequate medical attention. All of Mollie Hunter’s A Sound

of Chariots (1972) and much of the Bildungsroman that Betty Smith
wrote, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943), are testimonies to the nar-
rators’ grief for their prematurely dead fathers. In the former,
Bridie’s father dies from complications with his war wounds; in
the latter, Francie’s father dies from alcoholism-induced compli-
cations. Cynthia Voigt’s David and Jonathan (1992) deals with Ho-
locaust grief — as do almost all books about the Holocaust, ex-
cept Lois Lowry’s Number the Stars (1989). Lowry’s The Giver (1993)
is far more convincing as a Holocaust novel because it contains a
compelling image of genocide when a baby is killed for not fitting
into his culture. In fact, Anne Frank’s Diary (1952) is often the
most effective book I teach because students are deeply affected
by the death of a historical person at the age of fifteen. Students
new to the narrative of death’s power who have been trained as
readers in a culture immersed in the avoidance of death assume
that Anne will live and are often shocked that she does not.
t ragic loss of innocence

Understanding Being-towards-death leads adolescent charac-
ters into a loss of innocence that seems, at least initially, tragic.
Wilbur is scared of dying, but he does not seem headed for self-
destruction because of his knowledge of death. Holden Caulfield
does. Ged, in Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea, looses catastrophe
on his world when he releases his own death from the under-
world. Only in confronting his own mortality, naming it, and
accepting it can Ged obliterate the destructive incubus that he, in
his prideful innocence, has inflicted on himself and Earthsea.
Laura transforms herself into a witch in Mahy’s The Changeover
(1984) to defeat the incubus that is killing her brother. Her trans-
formation is permanent, as is her power over the incubus she
eventually kills. Holden, Ged, and Laura grow only because they
recognize and accept themselves as Being-towards-death. Before
they come to this stage of acceptance, they seem poised for an
inevitable fall created by their own vulnerability. When they over-
come their tragic vulnerability and avert catastrophe, transforming
the tragedy of their own mortality into at least some level of tri-
umph, they experience a heightened awareness of what power
they do and do not hold in their lives.
Death and Dominant Discourse
It is not without significance that the discourse surrounding

death recurs in adolescent literature with the consistency of the
two other dominant discourses of the ya novel, the establishment
of an identity independent from one’s parents and the exploration
of sexuality. Death, authority, and sexuality are mutually impli-
cated. Adolescents understand that their biological parents had
sex to conceive them. What they may not always acknowledge —
although the fact is indisputable — is that sex exists as a biological
antidote to death. Species procreate because they are mortal. Ju-
deo-Christian tradition links sex and death in its master narrative
that sex did not exist until Adam and Eve became mortal and were
expelled from the Garden of Eden. I have always suspected that
authority figures in our culture protect children from knowledge
of sex because of our cultural desire to protect children from a
knowledge of death. Philippe Ariès refers to this as the ‘‘interdict
laid upon death’’ in the twentieth century (2). The romantic image
of the innocent child still dominating our culture perpetuates the
illusion that children flourish best if they are free from the cor-
rupting knowledge of carnality. Carnality: sex and death, death and
sex. They are cultural and biological concepts that are linked
inviolably.
Aidan Chambers’s Breaktime illustrates how sex and death are
linked discursively in adolescent literature. In Chapter 4, I used
Breaktime as an example of a novel in which sex serves as a rite of
passage for the protagonist, Ditto. The novel depicts a boy who
gains empathy for his father once he has had sex. Ditto’s father
eventually tells him, ‘‘Maybe we should both try harder to see each
other’s point of view’’ (172). But one significant narrative fact re-
mains: Ditto needs to gain empathy for his father because the boy
fears that his father, who has suffered a heart attack during a fight
with Ditto, is dying. While his father is in the hospital and Ditto
is en route to an assignation with his lover, Helen, he witnesses
one of his mates fight with his own father. Ditto’s recognition that
they lack empathy for one another is central to his ability to de-
velop empathy for his own father — as is the revelation that
Ditto’s father gave up his dreams of riding motocross when he
was eighteen. In other words, Ditto’s losing his virginity is not the
sole prerequisite of Ditto’s gained empathy, but death and sex are
clearly linked. In one comic scene, for example, Ditto describes
an undertaker’s daughter forcing her sexual attentions on one of
his friends. They have intercourse in a coffin (130 –131).
In fact, the text eventually establishes Ditto as an unreliable
narrator who may have invented having intercourse with Helen as
a story he has spun for a school chum. (The fact of his father’s
heart attack and Ditto’s gained empathy for him are indisputably
established, however.) Ditto’s school chum has challenged him
that ‘‘literature is, by definition, a lie’’ (6). Ditto then uses discourse
to tell the tale of his father’s heart attack, the fight he has wit-
nessed between a mate and his father, and intercourse with Helen
to dispute the claim that fiction is not truthful. Ditto refuses to
identify which portions of his narrative have ‘‘really’’ happened,
but the fact that he links sex and death in his own discursive cre-
ation indicates their apposition in his mind. Thus, Ditto relies
on discourse to create a narrative about power, authority, sex,
and death. That he employs these factors to define his own
growth indicates the interrelationship of these issues in adolescent
literature.
Death, Photography, and Language
But Young Adult novels complicate death as a literary topic not

only in the thematic subject of death as a matter of content, but
also by incorporating it in subtle ways into the very narrative
structure of the novel itself. The relationship between death as
subject and death informing narrative structure becomes espe-
cially apparent in ya novels about photography, for photography
affords ya novelists an opportunity to explore the relationship
between agency, death, and discourse. That is, as adolescents
come to understand themselves as agents, as acting subjects, they
can also begin to understand better the relationship between life
and death. Novels that employ photography create many oppor-
tunities for characters to explore metaphorically the relationship
between subject and object, between acting and being acted upon.
This dichotomy between agency and passivity that is embedded in
language as the relationship between subject and object creates
narrative instances of Being-towards-death so that the narrative

itself becomes implicated in the exploration of what it means
to die. To demonstrate how ya novels can comment on death
both thematically and structurally, I will first discuss photography
theory and demonstrate how it has bearing on issues of subjec-
tivity and objectivity in three ya novels: Lois Lowry’s A Summer to
Die (1977), Francesca Lia Block’s Witch Baby (1991), and Trudy
Krisher’s Spite Fences (1994); then I will analyze how death and
narrative structure are linked in these novels.
All of these novels employ photographing protagonists as met-
aphors for the relationship between power and agency. The met-
aphor of the camera bestowing upon the photographer a sense of
empowerment based on the communicative abilities of photo-
graphs occurs often in literature.2 A Summer to Die, Witch Baby, and
Spite Fences demonstrate the protagonist employing photography
as a metaphorical representation for achieving agency. The intri-
cacy of the photography metaphor also allows these narratives to
explore the nature of subjectivity as constructed by language while
simultaneously foregrounding Being-towards-death as an issue of
both theme and narrative structure. In other words, the relation-
ship between the protagonist’s increased awareness of the subject-
object relationship occurs in conjunction with her maturing into
some sort of acceptance of the grief that accompanies death and
loss. Moreover, the parallel lines of the character’s understanding
of subjectivity and of death pass through a series of points created
by the repetition of various photographs. Viewing these pictures
from differing vantage points increases each character’s perspi-
cacity. The protagonist must experience this series of photo-
graphic repetitions in order to achieve resolution in both the pho-
tographic and the narrative sense: she must perceive herself clearly
in order to achieve the emotional resolution that seems at times
almost de rigueur in adolescent literature.3 Thus, photography af-
fects both content and form in A Summer to Die, Witch Baby, and
Spite Fences.
In Camera Lucida, an extended essay on photography, Roland
Barthes discusses how the fluid relationship between subject and
object becomes an issue in the art of photography when a camera
negotiates the space between them.4 The photographer has agency
and the photograph itself does not, for it is an artifact, but the
camera is an object that transforms images of people — acting

subjects — into objects, in the process giving them a new signifi-
cance they might not have previously held. As Martha Banta
notes, the concept of ‘‘camera vision’’ reflects the tendency of the
wandering human eye to focus on one object; the act of focusing
singles out the object, giving it importance (26). Indeed, the earli-
est portrait photos ‘‘transformed subject into object, and even one
might say, into a museum object: in order to take the first portraits
(around 1840) the subject had to assume long poses under a glass
roof in bright sunlight; to become an object made one suffer as
much as a surgical operation’’ (Barthes 13). The camera and the
act of photography demonstrate that the relationship between
subject and object is often continuous rather than discrete; sepa-
rating the actor from the acted upon is not always easy. As Mar-
ianne Hirsch puts it, ‘‘we both look and are looked at . . . the
subject is installed in the social through that double, mutual, per-
ceptual relationship which makes every spectator also a spectacle’’
(103). In a photograph, ‘‘the looking subject is always already in
the image, shaping it with his or her own reflection or projection’’
(Hirsch 103, emphasis in the original). The photograph is there-
fore a unique artifact in the way that it is capable of capturing at
once images of the individual’s subjectivity and objectivity. In this
dual role, then, photography shares one similarity with language:
both depend on the subject-object relationship and the fluid rela-
tionship between them to function. Photography bears another
relationship to language in the way that it forces us to consider the
relationship between signifier and signified. Whereas Saussure has
taught us to separate the signifier from the signified in linguistic
constructions, Barthes points out that photographs are a type of
signifier immediately indistinguishable from the signified.5 Is the
picture itself a signifier, representing some other object, or is it
signified, itself an artifact communicating directly to the viewer? 6
It is perhaps for this reason — because of the unique way that
cameras allow adolescents to blend subject and object, to integrate
signifier and signified — that adolescent novels employ camera
metaphors as a way to explore agency as a linguistic construct that
empowers the adolescent. The three novels I am discussing also
provide characters with some of the tendencies Susan Sontag
identifies for photography: in their ubiquity and passivity, photo-
graphs can become a source of aggression (7), and cameras can

create a sense of vicariousness (10) that may also sanction the
photographer’s nonintervention in painful issues (11). For char-
acters who take pictures instead of becoming involved, photog-
raphy can become a source of complicity, a way to approve tacitly
that which they might not otherwise be able to change (12). Cam-
eras serve to both empower and disempower adolescents’ agency.
What holds true for Sontag holds true in each of these three nov-
els: the photographic act and the character’s capacity to view the
photograph matter more than the photograph itself. Not surpris-
ingly, given the didactic ideological impulse that shapes so much
adolescent fiction, most adolescent novels that employ photo-
graphic metaphors value the function of taking pictures over the
form of the final product. Pictures are important not so much in
and of themselves but for what they teach the adolescent, espe-
cially as they become repeated artifacts that allow the character to
witness the same scene during several different points in her or
his development.7 As a result, the process of photography engages
the fictional adolescent’s agency in a way that enables the charac-
ter to embrace her or his subjectivity.
A Summer to Die
Lois Lowry’s A Summer to Die is a clear-cut example of this ten-

dency. Most of the story is about Meg’s reactions to her sister
Molly as Molly dies of leukemia. Meg’s camera is crucial to her
acceptance of Molly’s death; before she realizes that her sister has
a fatal disease, Meg cares more about her camera than almost any-
thing (9, 67). She says, ‘‘All those times when I feel awkward and
inept — all those times are made up for when I have my camera,
when I can look through the viewfinder and feel that I can control
the focus and the light and the composition, when I can capture
what I see, in a way that no one else is seeing it’’ (29). These final
clauses identify Meg’s photography as a crucial aspect of her ex-
ploration of subjectivity and objectivity: she wants to claim for
herself what she sees, to own it, hold it captive, as she would any
object; but most important, she wants to prove that her percep-
tions are different from everyone else’s. She explores her subjec-
tivity by manipulating photographic objects. Meg’s insistence on

manipulating the subject and object sets up the text’s awareness
that language is predicated on perceptions of subjectivity and ob-
jectivity. Meg’s experiments seem like metaphorical experiments
with language as well, especially in the way that Meg is concerned
with how the pictures she takes communicate something to other
people.
Meg even recognizes that her imagistic interpretations of those
she has photographed must have an effect on their sense of their
own subjectivity: ‘‘It must be a funny feeling, I think, to see your
own face like that, caught by someone else, with all your feelings
showing in it’’ (48). As Barthes says, ‘‘In front of the lens, I am . . .
the one I think I am, the one I want others to think I am, the one
the photographer thinks I am, and the one he makes use of to
exhibit his art’’ (13). In identifying four positions on a continuum
from subject to object position that the photographed person
holds, Barthes outlines the nuances a photograph can contain.
Meg intuitively understands them when she says, ‘‘I care about the
expressions on people’s faces, the way the light falls onto them,
and the way the shadows are in soft patterns and contrast’’ (113).
She cares most about the two object positions that Barthes iden-
tifies: how she perceives people and how she can transform their
images into art. To Meg, her art is a matter of engaging her agency
to transform other people into objects as a way to communicate to
them. Her camera is her language; the resulting pictures are her
specific speech acts.8
Meg acknowledges consciously the importance of processing
her pictures herself. She recognizes how to use processing as a
way to ‘‘compensate for all sorts of things, how to build up con-
trast, how to reduce it’’ (80). It is the process of achieving a final
product that has the resolution of her choosing, not necessar-
ily the end product itself, that empowers Meg. In other words,
Meg recognizes that the photographic process entails more than
just granting agency to the person taking the picture; agency can
be achieved in the photographic process, as agency can also be
achieved within the process of constructing ourselves of language.
As Catharine Belsey notes, the subject is constructed by lan-
guage and by the exterior forces that language asserts upon the
individual (Belsey 46–50), for — as Lacan puts it — the uncon-
scious mind is itself constructed like a language system (Four 149).9

In this sense, Meg’s photographic equipment also serves as a met-
aphor for the unconscious mind: within the equipment lies the
structures necessary to discern and to blend the differences be-
tween subject and object.
Despite the intricacy with which Lowry imbues Meg’s use of
photography, the greatest flaw in this book is how easy the camera
makes birth and death experiences for Meg. In that, the book ful-
fills Sontag’s definition of photographer as voyeur and nonpartici-
pant. In this case, the voyeurism deprives Meg of agency and,
therefore, of some degree of maturity. For example, a friend of
Meg’s delivers a baby as quickly and painlessly as a character in a
soap opera. Meg has been asked to photograph the birth, and she
deals with her panic in this situation by hiding behind her camera:
‘‘I lifted my camera and photographed Maria smiling. The instant
I had the camera in my hands, things felt comfortable. The light
was good; the settings fell into place as I manipulated them; ev-
erything was okay’’ (128). Meg and the reader are both deprived
of any sense of the necessary pain surrounding childbirth. More-
over, Meg’s sister Molly dies offstage so that Meg does not have
to witness the pain of death firsthand, either. Apparently, although
her parents think that she is old enough to watch someone being
born, she is not old enough to watch someone die.
Significantly, however, Meg reconciles herself to her grief over
Molly’s death by gazing at a photograph of herself taken by a
friend.
It was a large photograph, against a white mount, framed in a
narrow black frame, and it was not just the coincidence of a
stranger who happened to look like me; it was my face. It was
taken at an angle; the wind was blowing my hair, and I was
looking off in the distance somewhere, far beyond the meticu-
lously trimmed edges of the photograph or the rigid confines
of its frame. The outline of my neck and chin and half-turned
cheek was sharp against the blurred and subtle shapes of pine
trees in the background. . . . There was something of Molly in
my face. It startled me, seeing it. The line that defined my face,
the line that separated the darkness of the trees from the light
that curved into my forehead and cheek was the same line that
had once identified Molly by its shape. The way I held my

shoulders was the way she had held hers. It was a transient
thing, I knew, but when Will had held the camera and released
the shutter for one five-hundredth of a second, he had captured
it and made permanent whatever of Molly was in me. I was
grateful, and glad. (150 –151)
The emotional climax of the book occurs when Meg for the first
time views herself as an object in a photograph. As John Stephens
notes, Meg ‘‘breaks into a new way of seeing and a new subject
position’’ from this experience (286). Meg has now experienced
the subject position — that is, a position of action, of agency—
and the object position.
This need to recognize one’s own agency is a central pattern of
adolescent literature; we achieve adulthood more comfortably if
we recognize that we have some control over the various subject
positions we occupy than if we feel entirely like objects, pawns, in
other people’s movements. But conversely, maturity also depends
on our ability to maintain, when necessary, an object position, for
we are all objects of the cultural forces that constantly shape us.
Again, the relationship between subject and object is a fluid one,
but gaining an increased understanding of one’s power as an act-
ing subject is inevitable during maturation. Sontag focuses on the
cultural power photography gives the photographing subject: ‘‘To
photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means
putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like
knowledge — and, therefore, power’’ (4). For Meg, the power of
knowledge occurs from taking and seeing photographs. She only
achieves the pleasure of knowledge/power when she has experi-
enced both the subject and the object positions afforded by pho-
tography, after she has been both photographing subject and
photographed object.
Witch Baby
Francesca Lia Block’s Witch Baby also ties issues of subjectivity

and objectivity to issues of maturity by means of photography
metaphors. A postmodern fairy tale like its predecessor Weetzie
Bat, Witch Baby is the story of the eponymous character who asks,
‘‘ What time are we upon and where do I belong?’’ (3, 9, 15). Suf-
fering from the same sense of fragmentation that Sharon Wilson
identifies as common in Margaret Atwood’s novels dealing with
photography (31), Witch Baby understands neither her paternity
nor her culture, postmodern Los Angeles. As she seeks to better
understand them both, she grows to recognize her subjectivity.
Witch Baby is confused about her identity because her parents
have not been honest with her. She was abandoned as an infant at
the home of Weetzie Bat and her significant other, whose name is
My Secret Agent Lover Man; Weetzie and My Secret have not told
her that he is her biological father. Much of Witch Baby’s identity
is defined by her jealousy for Weetzie’s biological daughter, Chero-
kee. Witch Baby has dark, tangled hair and slanting purple eyes;
she is mysterious and very angry.
When it comes to photography, Witch Baby is like Meg in that
she takes pictures from the outset of the narrative, but she is never
the object of any photo. ‘‘ Witch Baby had taken photographs of
everyone in her almost-family. . . . Because she had taken all the
pictures herself, there was no witch child with dark tangled hair
and tilted purple eyes’’ in her collection of pictures pasted on the
family clock (3). She sees but feels herself to be unseen; she lives
in the shadow of her vibrant sister, Cherokee.
When a boy Witch Baby has a crush on hears her play the
drums, she is pleased by his attention: ‘‘It was as if she were being
seen by someone for the first time’’ (23). But she grieves be-
cause My Secret Agent Lover Man does not recognize how simi-
lar the two of them are in both worrying about the pain in the
world around them; both of them recognize themselves as Being-
towards-death. Witch Baby even tapes three articles or news
photos to her wall each night that detail something wrong with
the world; one of these articles about a group of Native Ameri-
cans who have died of radiation poisoning inspires My Secret
Agent Lover Man to make a movie. Later, Witch Baby is again
pleased when another friend, Coyote, sees how similar she is to
him and to My Secret Agent Lover Man in that they share a mutual
grief about world issues. She thinks of Coyote, ‘‘But he recognizes
that I am like him and My Secret doesn’t see’’ (31). Feeling that
the (Name-of-the-)Father cannot see her causes Witch Baby even

more pain.
Throughout the story, Witch Baby continues to snap pictures
of her family and their life together, of homeless people on the
street, of people dying of aids, of the beach, of the redwood for-
est. She continues to ask herself and other people where she be-
longs. Eventually, she learns that My Secret Agent Lover Man is
her father. She runs away to seek her biological mother, Vixanne
Wigg, and is disillusioned when she discovers that Vixanne is the
leader of a Jayne Mansfield cult that does nothing but watch
Mansfield movies, eat sugar, and deny that evil exists in the world.
Trying to communicate that these attempts to escape from pain
are futile, Witch Baby leaves behind her a series of photographs
that she has taken of homeless people and victims of aids; she
hopes her mother ‘‘will look at them and see’’ (93). At this juncture
in the novel, Witch Baby clearly perceives her photography as a
form of language, for these pictures are signifiers of both world
angst and Witch Baby’s feelings. Only through photographs can
she communicate to Vixanne what she cares most about.
Witch Baby finally returns home, where her father recognizes
how much alike they are and where the other members of her
family also voice their appreciation of her. The family’s final trib-
ute to Witch Baby is to pose for a family portrait, but this time
with the camera on a timer so that Witch Baby can be included in
the picture. Witch Baby looks around at the people in this family
portrait and recognizes their pain and their grief: some fear aids,
others have lost their beloved; some suffer from discrimination,
others mourn ‘‘for the sky and sea, animals and vegetables, that
were full of toxins’’ (102). Yet she finally understands that ‘‘her
own sadness was only a small piece of the puzzle of pain that
made up the globe. But she was a part of the globe — she had her
place’’ (102–103). Witch Baby has gained a sense of identity, but
she cannot fully claim the subject position until she recognizes
that the people around her accept her in both the object and the
subject position. Her transformation seems to be much like Meg’s
in A Summer to Die: Witch Baby needs to understand herself
as object before she can place herself within the matrix of her
own subject positions. The process of photography leads Witch
Baby and Meg to their transcendent understanding of their own

agency.
Spite Fences
Spite Fences, by Trudy Krisher, employs photography metaphors

in a narrative that explores racial tension. Thirteen-year-old Mag-
gie Pugh uses her camera as a way to look at life in small-town
Georgia in 1960. Throughout the narrative, when she wants to
evaluate a situation, she thinks of it in terms of a freeze-frame,
telling herself, ‘‘Aim. Click. . . . Advance the film. Trip the shutter. . . .
Focus. Click’’ (2). Maggie, who is white, receives the camera as a
gift from a black friend named Zeke after she starts teaching him
to read because she thinks he does not know how to read the word
white on a rest room door. Because he has used the rest room, he
is arrested and beaten, and later brutalized by a mob that urinates
on him and masturbates over his unconscious body. Maggie, hid-
den from the mob in a tree, has witnessed the near-lynching of
her friend. Her fear for her friend’s life causes her to recognize
herself as Being-towards-death. Never before has she confronted
mortality. Ultimately, she agrees to serve as a witness in court so
that his case can be prosecuted. She wants to quit living in fear of
other people’s violence. Her words thus have the power to change
the course of her hometown’s history.
Maggie learns to respect the Civil Rights movement that is un-
folding around her, but she must also learn how to handle the
effects of institutionalized racism on white people, specifically on
her mother and on their spiteful neighbors. Maggie’s mother beats
her after seeing photographs of Maggie with some of her black
friends. The next-door neighbor has already tried to rape her. In
an ugly altercation between the two families, Maggie’s camera gets
broken, and she is devastated. She recognizes that because of the
evil of racism ‘‘everything’’ in her hometown is as ‘‘smashed and
broken to bits’’ as her camera is by the effects of racism (171). But
when her best girlfriend gives her a new single-lens camera, she
says she feels, ‘‘for the first time in my whole life, like I’d finally
been born’’ (195).
For Maggie, the perspective the camera provides her is more
than a matter of feeling a sense of agency — it is a matter of ex-

pressing truth. Thus, as the text unravels, Maggie identifies occu-
pying the subject position as seeing and speaking the truth. Early
in the text, Zeke has told her, ‘‘Never be afraid of the truth’’ (12).
When he gives Maggie her first camera, he tells her, ‘‘I got you this
camera, Maggie, to help you with the truth. So you’ll first trust
your eyes to see it and then trust your own voice to tell it’’ (102).
In order for Maggie to quit being a victim of racism, classism,
physical abuse, and sexual assault, she needs to learn to be honest
and to be vocal. And she uses photography as her voice to ex-
press the truth as she sees it. She even demonstrates how language
and photography are related for her when she describes her
memories of Zeke’s brutalization: ‘‘They were images inside me
that I wanted to forget, but they were things, in truth, that I
needed to remember. They were the undeveloped pictures in the
camera of my mind’’ (182).
When the African-American people of Maggie’s community
stage a sit-down at a lunch counter that white supremacists turn
into a riot, Maggie takes pictures that capture the horror of the
violence. She tells herself, ‘‘Trip the shutter, Maggie. You know what
you’re seeing here. You’ve got to get it down’’ (271). The rioters assault
one of her closest friends, and she says, ‘‘ What filled my lens was
more than the blood gushing from my sweet friend. It was the red
color of the fence, the red color of the earth on which I stood. It
was red, the color of my life this summer. . . . Red: it was the color
of [my hometown]’’ (272). The photographs Maggie takes that day
win a contest and are published in Life magazine as part of a series
on racial violence during the Civil Rights movement. Maggie’s
mother cannot forgive her for befriending people of another race,
so at the text’s end, Maggie and her mother are estranged. Maggie
accepts the necessity of their emotional distance, however, for
she recognizes that her mother will never respect her daughter’s
agency. But because Maggie has found a life’s work that fore-
grounds her subjectivity in ways that she values, and because she
has found friends who respect that subjectivity, Maggie has grown
into a self-acceptance that indicates her maturity.
Maggie, like Meg and Witch Baby, has used photography as a
physical expression of the primacy of her interiority. Operating
the camera represents her internal process of claiming the subject
position. More than any of these other novels, Spite Fences openly
expresses the result of photography as a matter of expressing
truth. But the photographs all of these characters take ultimately
represent truth for each of them. And a central truth that each of
these novels shares is the implication that without the camera —
that is, without her individual artistic representation of language
and, it therefore follows, without some form of language itself —
the character would remain powerless, a victim stranded in the
object position of some other camera’s gaze.
Death and Photography
Significantly, these novels also share the concern with death

that is so common in adolescent literature. A Summer to Die iden-
tifies the topic in the title; Meg experiences and eventually recon-
ciles herself to her sister’s death. Witch Baby’s anxieties can almost
all be traced back to a strong sense of grief for the death of living
things: she fears the destruction of the environment and what the
aids pandemic does to people; she fears serial killers and what
will happen to the missing children pictured on milk cartons; she
fears ‘‘nuclear accidents, violence, poverty and disease’’ (8), and she
mourns for ‘‘families dying of radiation, old people in rest homes
listening for sirens, ragged men and women wandering barefoot
through the city, becoming ghosts because no one wanted to see
them’’ (92). Maggie experiences the metaphorical death of her re-
lationship with her mother, but even more important, she expe-
riences the near-death of her friend Zeke who is almost lynched.
Her fear of the violence her friend has suffered creates in her a
new fear that seems to be linked to the fear of death. Certainly the
fear she feels for Zeke’s life is the greatest emotional transforma-
tion of her life. The experience is a chilling one.
These characters, like so many in adolescent literature, must
grapple with Being-towards-death if they are to mature. Acknowl-
edging death occurs as a stage for the protagonist of almost ev-
ery Bildungsroman. Sometimes teenagers such as those in John
Knowles’s A Separate Peace are reckless because they are testing the
limits of their mortality; other teenagers — like Elizabeth in Cres-
cent Dragonwagon’s The Year It Rained (1985) — are obsessively
morbid not so much because they are being self-indulgent, but

because they are immersing themselves in something they do not
understand as a way to try to understand it. Acknowledging death
is one mark of maturity; adolescent novels about protagonists
who reconcile themselves to grief are clearly targeting this emo-
tional need of adolescents.
Roland Barthes, perhaps, would think it no small coincidence
that death permeates these ya novels that are ostensibly about
photography. Camera Lucida is, after all, his elegy for his mother.
Photographs have as their subtext the death of the person pho-
tographed; they are both memory and memorial. Barthes has ar-
gued not only for the subject-object duality in photography, but
also for its conflation of life and death. He calls the photograph
‘‘that very subtle moment when, to tell the truth, I am neither
subject nor object but a subject who feels he is becoming an ob-
ject: I then experience a micro-version of death . . . : I am truly
becoming a specter’’ (14).10 Barthes calls the photographer a type
of embalmer (14) and the photograph a ‘‘flat Death’’ (92); the
separation between life and death ‘‘is reduced to a simple click, the
one separating the initial pose from the final print’’ (92). Every
photograph of a person captures in a lifeless position someone
who is either dead or will die eventually; in ‘‘every photograph is
this catastrophe’’ (Barthes 96). In this, Barthes defines death as
the ultimate position of objectivity, for in death the body is com-
pletely without agency.
Barthes cites Edgar Morin’s observation that the ‘‘crisis of
death,’’ that is, the beginning of a time when our society be-
came more obsessively negative about death, began in the mid-
nineteenth century at about the same time that photography
became a cultural institution and about the same time that the
Bildungsroman emerged as a literary genre (92). It was only shortly
after this that developmental psychologists codified adolescence
as a stage of life. The very fact that Freud and his followers felt so
compelled to compartmentalize the passing stages of our lives
marks a cultural view of life as an inexorable march to death. In
other words, both photography and developmental psychology
confirmed the process of fixing things in time for a culture that
was increasingly teleologically oriented.
It seems only natural, then, that people living a stage of their
lives that marks them one step closer to a progression toward

death would fix on photography as a way of understanding the
relationship between life and death. Indeed, adolescence is often
the stage of life associated with the individual’s first serious grap-
pling with death as an inevitability. Photographs seem to mark a
way of slowing the process down for the adolescent characters in
these novels. If they can capture truth on film, creating a series of
miniature death images for themselves in transforming the sub-
jects around them into objects, perhaps death will not have as
much power over them. If they can make time stand still, perhaps
they can in some sense defeat death. Even more important, all
three of the characters in these novels actually experience the
death/object position of the camera’s gaze and survive to tell their
stories. Indeed, their experiences as objects prove essential to
their growth. Photography allows these characters to explore a
paradox crucial to their need to understand death: is the camera
stopping time or acknowledging its passage? In the illusion of per-
manence that they afford the photographer, photographs even
seem to transcend death, for they can survive long after the pho-
tographer and the photographed subject/object are dead.
Death and Narrative Structure
Basing his argument on Roland Barthes’s observation that nar-

rative progression is also an inevitable action, Peter Brooks dem-
onstrates yet another teleological factor at work here (‘‘Freud’s
Masterplot’’ 282). Brooks defines the narrative structure of the
novel as an avoidance of death. The length of the narrative is de-
signed to circumvent its own death, which is represented by the
novel’s ending (Brooks, ‘‘Freud’s Masterplot’’ 282–283).11 Narra-
tives avoid their own endings (read: ‘‘deaths’’) specifically by cre-
ating a series of repetitions; any series of events allows characters
to work toward greater understanding and simultaneously avoid
the narrative’s own and the reading subject’s demise, which will
occur when the characters achieve understanding and the narra-
tive ends (Brooks, ‘‘Freud’s Masterplot’’ 285–296; Brooks, Reading
for the Plot 97–109).12
In the novels under investigation, photographic images serve
strikingly to provide each protagonist with repetitions that move

the character closer to the narrative’s end and simultaneously de-
lay that movement. For example, Meg in A Summer to Die takes a
series of pictures of her friend Will (28 –29), then views them
again when she develops them (45), when she shows them to her
mother (46), when she shows them to her sister (49), when she
shows them to Will himself (66– 67), and when she shows them
to her friends Ben and Maria (97). She does not completely un-
derstand the implications of her own photography, however, until
she sees a different image: herself repeated as an object of Will’s
photography. Only when the repetition occurs with variation is
true resolution in both senses of the term possible: Meg sees her-
self as a clear, highly resolved image and thus resolves her own
crisis by no longer avoiding the implications of her sister’s death.
Witch Baby experiences her sense of alienation in a repeated
series of family photographs, most notably the pictures she has
taken of them and pasted to the face of the clock. The pictures on
the clock are described four times in the narrative; that the family’s
images are affixed to a clock signifies Witch Baby’s awareness of
the passing of time and of how pictures can transcend that passage
(3, 52–53, 82, 100 –101). She repeatedly returns to these images
until she achieves the variation necessary for resolution by includ-
ing herself in the final picture, the one she glues at the pinnacle of
the clockface over the number twelve (100 –101).
For Maggie, the most important repetition is her capturing of
the violence waged against peaceful protesters not only when the
pictures are developed, but also when they are printed in Life
magazine. Only when she sees the image replicated in a public
forum is she able to assure herself that she has accomplished
something meaningful in improving race relations in her home-
town. Perhaps her actions have averted other people’s needless
deaths; in any event, she seems better positioned to accept, as
Witch Baby does, the inevitability that much of life is ugly and
painful.
For all these characters, then, either one photograph or a
series of related photographs provides a recursive way of working
through conflict toward resolution.13 Photographs slow down
each narrative’s progression toward its own demise, but they also
allow each character to resolve her crisis. For Meg, Witch Baby,
and Maggie, emotional resolutions involve some sort of accep-

tance of death. And in each case, photography functions both the-
matically, implicating the character in related investigations of
agency and grief, and structurally, underscoring the impetus of the
narrative toward its own death.
Although this tendency is noticeably present in novels about
photography, the pattern is also significant in novels that do not
necessarily directly link cameras and death, for any number of ya
novels have similar recursive moments that slow down the nar-
rative and simultaneously move the plot toward an inexorable
conclusion. In Gillian Cross’s Pictures in the Dark (1996), Charlie
Willcox returns several times to photographs of otters. His scru-
tinizing of the images eventually leads him to understand that his
friend Peter is a shape-shifter. During the deathlike trances Peter
experiences because of his parents’ abuse, he becomes one with
the otter. Shape-shifting is his way of escaping his parents’ abuse
of power. Emily tries to understand an abuse of power so egre-
gious it leads to death in Angela Johnson’s Toning the Sweep. Her
grandfather was lynched by a mob of racist southerners during
the Civil Rights movement, and she puts his ghost to rest by
videotaping her grandmother and her friends as they talk about
the complexities of their lives. For Laura, in Margaret Mahy’s The
Changeover, the repeated image is one an incubus has stamped on
her little brother’s hand. Every time Laura sees the image, her
brother is closer to death. She kills the incubus by stamping her
brother’s image on its hand; that is, she gains power over the in-
cubus through a variation on the original image. In Aidan Cham-
bers’s Breaktime, Ditto lusts after a photograph of his girlfriend
Helen posing in her bathing suit (20, 22, 39, 51, 52, 72). She is little
more than an object to him until he recognizes her sexual agency
(76–77). His acknowledgment of it occurs in a conversation filled
with self-awareness of discourse, and she then agrees to have sex
with him (132–133). After having sex with Helen, no longer able
to objectify her, Ditto locks Helen’s picture away in a suitcase
(177). During the same afternoon, he has made peace with his
dying father. The repetition with variation occurs for Ditto when
he can no longer view the signified of the photograph as an object.
Harry Potter is obsessed with his parents’ photographs through-
out J. K. Rowling’s series. The photograph of his father is particu-
larly influential in helping Harry reconcile himself to his parents’

death, especially after the boy enacts what is his father within him-
self and becomes, temporarily, the image of his own father one
magical night (Prisoner of Azkaban 212, 407, 427– 428). The re-
peated image in Cormier’s The Chocolate War that Jerry returns to
again and again is less iconic than verbal. A line from ‘‘The Love
Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’’ inspires him throughout the text, but
he is only able to ask ‘‘Do I dare disturb the universe?’’ because
he sees a poster with this line every time he opens his locker.
Although Jerry concludes that he has been wrong to try disturbing
the universe, Cormier’s message to the reader is the opposite: it is
Jerry’s assailants who have been wrong, it is Jerry’s sense of nihil-
ism as he lies dying that is wrong. Cormier wants adolescents to
disturb the universe, and he drives his point home by repeating a
pivotal phrase so many times in the novel that the reader finally
understands its import, even if the protagonist never does. Many
ya novels engage similar repetitions. Thematically, these repeti-
tions imply that death is as inevitable as is the eventual ending of
each narrative. Thus, death is embedded in the very discourse of
much adolescent literature.
Deborah Bowen links death, narrative structure, and photog-
raphy when she calls photographic imagery ‘‘a metaphor for the
life-giving and death-dealing enterprise of writing fictions’’ (22).
Photographs paradoxically ‘‘offer assurances of identity and clarity;
at the same time they undermine the very attempt to control ex-
perience by demonstrating that to freeze time and space is to ren-
der them obsolete’’ (Bowen 22). For Barthes, photography is an
ontological matter because the ‘‘photograph mechanically repeats
what could never be repeated existentially’’ (4). The camera gives
these characters the power to transform subject and object. This,
in turn, transmutes the effects of death by giving them a tangible
means of exploring the linguistic imperatives of sentience as they
return as often as necessary to the images that provide them with
the opportunity of occupying both the subject and the object
position.
In demonstrating how photography serves several functions in
adolescent literature, poststructural theory about cameras and
photographs provides us with a new way of reading some works
of adolescent literature. On the most basic level, novels that
include photography demonstrate characters experiencing both

subjectivity and objectivity. In that sense, then, photography be-
comes an extended metaphor for discourse, constructed as it is
entirely in terms of the character’s (and the reader’s) understand-
ing of subjectivity and objectivity. Photographs also serve as a
metaphor for death, allowing the adolescents to reconcile them-
selves to life as a teleological process. In the process of developing
this metaphor, photography also serves metonymically in the text
by providing a series of stop-action images that serve as the delay-
ing device necessary to the narrative’s resolution. The character
must experience and reexperience these images in order to achieve
the growth that is required of the Entwicklungsroman and the Bil-
dungsroman. The use of photography in adolescent literature is
therefore at once thematic and structural. In employing photog-
raphy as a metaphor, Lowry, Block, and Krisher demonstrate how
inevitably linked agency, discourse, and death are to the actual
narrative structure of many novels written for eleven- to fifteen-
year-olds.
This combined thematic and structural focus provides the

adolescent reader with images of empowered adolescents who
better understand agency and the discourses surrounding death.
The message to the adolescent reader that people are mortal is
clear, but the bleakness of the statement is perhaps mitigated by
these texts’ confidence in the reader’s ability to understand that
death is only one of the many phenomena that engage people as
subjects and objects. In one sense, however, death is the ulti-
mate and inviolable authority in adolescent literature. Adolescents
who come to accept Being-towards-death are teenagers accepting
(once again) their own limitations. The discourse of death in ado-
lescent literature therefore represents yet another institutional dis-
course in which the genre serves to simultaneously empower
readers with knowledge and to repress them by teaching them to
accept a curtailment of their power. Accepting one’s mortality is
indeed a powerful rite of passage predicated on understanding
oneself as finite. The knowledge of death may thus prove both
more repressive and more empowering to adolescents than are
discursive interactions with socially constructed institutions, au-
thority figures, or sexuality. Certainly, many novelists for young
adults intuitively understand the power and repression that Being-

towards-death creates for humans.
That so many narratives written for adolescents systematically
depict teenagers engaged in power-repression dynamics indicates
to me that the genre carries embedded within it a tacit under-
standing that adolescents are potentially quite — well — potent.
Among other things, adolescents experience these dynamics
within institutional discourses that control their understanding of
authority and of their physical bodies. If adolescents did not have
social and biological power so great that it is defined by authority
as needing institutional regulation, the entire genre of the post-
modern Entwicklungsroman would not have emerged in the form
that it has. In the acknowledgment that the very existence of
young adult literature authenticates, the genre indeed affirms ad-
olescents’ capacity to disturb the universe.
chapter 6
Conclusion
the poststructural pedagogy
of adolescent literature
he dynamics of power/repression I have discussed in
T the previous chapters are interrelated. Certainly no in-

stitution exists in isolation; no discursive construct
possibly can. Since institutions such as school, reli-
gion, church, identity politics, and family are invested in socializ-
ing adolescents, the depiction of these institutions in adolescent
literature are logically implicated in the establishment of narrative
authority and in the ideological manipulation of the reader. Cul-
tural representations of death and sex also rely on the adolescent’s
need to feel empowered and the culture’s simultaneous need to
repress the adolescent. As a result, discursive representations of
adolescents’ power and repression can be found integrated in all
ya novels.
For example, in Chapter 2 I discussed how M. E. Kerr’s novel
Is That You, Miss Blue? integrates rebellion against school with re-
bellion against religion. But the novel also shows how rebellion
against institutional authority is tied to rebellion against one’s par-
ents: Carolyn Cardmaker and Agnes Thatcher found the Atheists
Against All Cruelty to punish Carolyn’s father (an Episcopalian
minister) and the Charles School where they attend boarding
school. The pranks these two play allow them to experience
a sense of power against their parents, their school, and their
church in one fell swoop. Much of the anger the rebels in this
book feel resides in their awareness of institutionalized identity
politics: Carolyn, Agnes, and the narrator, Flanders, are angry
at the Charles School’s class-based sorority for reinforcing class
stratification. Agnes is angry at the social construction of the deaf
in her culture. Flanders is angry with her mother for not maintain-
ing a traditional gender role — an anger that Flanders ultimately
resolves when she finally begins talking to her mother again and
Poststructural Pedagogy : 143
feels that ‘‘I’d been seen and heard on my own’’ for the first time
(158). She expresses her individuation as a discursive construct:
she is visually seen as object, she is aurally heard as subject, and so
she feels recognized by her mother and thus able to participate in
the Symbolic Order.
Sexuality also plays a factor in Flanders’s growth. She has an
admirer, Sumner Thomas, who conflates sexuality with his fear of
mortality. His mother has committed suicide, and Sumner is ob-
sessed with her (70 –73, 97, 128 –129, 165–166). He explores his
obsession discursively, writing poems that Flanders eventually rec-
ognizes as a synthesis of his feelings about sex and his feelings
about his mother (165). Sumner is re-creating his mother in logos
parentis, trying to make her manifest in words:
You are words like ‘‘toward,’’ ‘‘in,’’ ‘‘here,’’ ‘‘yes,’’
‘‘now,’’ ‘‘come,’’ and ‘‘part of.’’
I am sliding.
You are ‘‘hush,’’ ‘‘dear,’’ ‘‘oh!’’ ‘‘Open,’’ ‘‘touch.’’
I am sliding.
You are ‘‘darling’’
(I can)
‘‘always’’
(not)
‘‘love me’’
(hold)
‘‘dearest’’
(out)
‘‘my’’
(much)
‘‘beloved’’
(longer)
I am a word like yours. (128 –129)
Sumner is Being-towards-death; Flanders recognizes that he must
work through his emotional tension with his dead mother before
he can grow.
Flanders also watches her teacher Miss Blue lose her sanity.
The visual symbol of Miss Blue’s martyrdom at the hands of her
rebellious students is a portrait of Mary, Queen of Scots, that
Miss Blue gazes at desiringly throughout the narrative. Eventually,
144 : Poststructural Pedagogy
Flanders and her friends steal the picture and give it to Miss Blue
to take with her after the Charles School fires her. Since the pic-
ture no longer hangs in its shrinelike position in the bathroom,
Flanders experiences the image as one of repetition with variation.
Thereafter, when she thinks of Miss Blue, she thinks of the por-
trait, feels grief, and fears for her teacher’s vulnerability and pos-
sible death (169). A recursively used picture that becomes a mark
of Flanders’s maturity has resulted from Miss Blue’s martyrdom.
Because of Flanders’s relationships with Miss Blue and with Sum-
ner, sex, death, and discourse become mutually implicated. No
single event in Is That You, Miss Blue? occurs isolated from one
teenage character’s perception of the role power and repression
play in her life.
Pedagogy
In the traditional study of adolescent literature, Entwicklungsro-

mane like Is That You, Miss Blue? have either been overlooked or
have been studied for their pedagogical value. Caroline Hunt ex-
plains why in ‘‘Young Adult Literature Evades the Theorists.’’ She
describes the study of Young Adult literature as a field which has
experienced a ‘‘striking lack of theoretical criticism’’ (4) and finds
ya criticism ‘‘healthy even if not, or not yet, particularly ‘theoreti-
cal’ ’’ (11). She offers as one reason that the field has developed,
divorced from poststructural critical theory, the fact that many ya
courses are part of teacher certification curricula and so have tra-
ditionally been more ‘‘applied’’ than theoretical (8), but she has
encouraged many of us to begin thinking more theoretically: ‘‘To-
day’s teachers of ya courses have learned their field, have justified
their existence, and can now go on toward theory if they wish’’
(8). One of the underlying agendas of this book has been to dem-
onstrate how important it is that we employ poststructural meth-
odologies when we analyze adolescent literature, since ya novels
are an outgrowth of postmodernism. ya novels depend on the
awareness of the individual as a social being upon which post-
modernism insists. Without a postmodern self-consciousness of
individuals as social constructs, the tension between the individual
and institutions that typifies the ya novel would be impossible to
depict. Poststructural theory trains readers to be aware of such

postmodern phenomenon. Therefore, by way of conclusion, I
hope to identify existing applications of poststructural theory that
pertain to the teaching of adolescent literature as a postmodern
literary phenomena.
Hunt’s acknowledgment of the limitless possibilities of post-
structural theory in the Young Adult literature classroom coin-
cides with an awareness on the part of many secondary pre-
service teachers that poststructuralism offers high school teachers
methods to help students access literature in ways that traditional
New Critical readings might not. Poststructuralism’s allowance
of reader-centered readings, contextualized readings, deconstruc-
tive readings, and (re)visionary readings offers much hope for
high school English teachers who are tired of discussing the
whiteness of the whale in Moby-Dick. Some gifted teachers can use
canonical readings of canonical texts to generate excitement
among students, who are usually themselves also gifted. But I
would not want to have to try it myself — so I offer now some
theoretical perspectives on teaching ya literature in the hopes of
contributing to the discussion about the place of poststructural
theory in the English education classroom already begun by
people like Bruce Pirie and Ray Linn.1
Reader-Centered Readings
If there is one thing poststructuralism has offered critics that

most liberates the adolescent reader, it is the concept of exactly
that: the adolescent reader. Before critics like Wolfgang Iser and
Stanley Fish started talking about the possibilities of multiple
readings and implied readers, high school students were told too
often that only one literary interpretation was ‘‘correct.’’ As Patro-
cinio Schweickart observes, everyone was taught to read like a
white male (adult). But articles like Anna Lawrence-Pietroni’s
analysis of Margaret Mahy’s novels show how some authors allow
for the possibility of a fluid reader, one who, in fact, might even
be adolescent. Anita Tarr’s phenomenological reading of Scott
O’Dell’s Island of the Blue Dolphins (1960) offers another perspective
on the adolescent reader, one that employs strategies similar to
Schweickart’s in teaching students how to refuse the position im-

posed on them by patriarchal texts like Island of the Blue Dolphins.
Tarr uses Iser’s concept of the ‘‘gap’’ to demonstrate how O’Dell
relies on stereotypes to create a number of both racist and sexist
lacunae for the reader to fill in. The significant thing in Tarr’s work
is how she provides students an alternative to the mind control
that they experience when a text creates an implied reader who is
sexist or racist.
Tarr’s technique can be applied to Bruce Brooks’s The Moves
Make the Man (1984). With that novel, Bruce Brooks makes the
same mistake that Scott O’Dell has in Island of the Blue Dolphins.
The narrator of The Moves Make the Man, Jerome Foxworthy, is a
black teenager. He feels compelled to explain black mores to his
reader, most notably in an opening description where he explains
black attitudes toward Little League. If Jerome’s commentary
were made specific to the culture of the town in which he lived,
such explication would be less problematic. But as it is, he acts as
if the reader has no knowledge of black culture. If the implied
reader were black, such explanations would be unnecessary, so my
students eventually arrive at the conclusion that The Moves Make
the Man defines the reader as white, even though the narrator is
black. Discussing a novel like this — especially in the context of
Tarr’s accessible descriptions of phenomenology and reader re-
sponse theory — helps my students get past their reductive logic
that ‘‘if the narrator is a white girl, the implied reader is a white
girl; if the narrator is a black boy, the implied reader is a black
boy.’’ As they learn to identify and negotiate the textual gaps ya
novels create, they learn to interrogate their own position as
readers, and they become both more active readers and more so-
cially aware.
Critics like Tarr who focus on the transaction between the text
and the reader are so common in children’s literature that I have
adopted a mental label for them: I call theorists such as Peter Hol-
lindale, Peter Hunt, Jill May, Rod McGillis, Maria Nikolajeva,
Perry Nodelman, Lissa Paul, and John Stephens Transactional
Critics. These critics have been leaders in asking readers of chil-
dren’s literature to be aware of how texts interact with their
readers in a transaction that is both aesthetic and cultural. They
are all influenced by poststructural criticism, and they all recognize

the primacy of understanding the relationship between the ado-
lescent reader and the text. Jill May formulates an underlying prin-
ciple that motivates these critics: adolescents can only become ac-
tive readers if they have been taught the skills required for active
reading by professionals who understand the nuances of how
texts operate (17).
Contextualized Readings
Part of creating more culturally aware readers is creating more

historically aware readers. Readers who understand themselves as
contextually bound and who understand the historical context of
what they read have a different understanding of a text than those
who are isolated from such information. People who do not un-
derstand the Holocaust cannot possibly understand Anne Frank’s
Diary, so I give history lessons when I teach it. Even explaining
the Great Depression helps students have (slightly) more toler-
ance for Seventeenth Summer. But such poststructural critics as Mitzi
Myers and Lynne Vallone provide readers with even more intri-
cate ways of understanding historical contextuality. Myers’s ‘‘Im-
peccable Governesses, Rational Dames, and Moral Mothers,’’ for
example, gives an intellectual history of one of the first novels
actually written for Young Adults, Mary Wollstonecraft’s Original
Stories from Real Life (1788). Lynne Vallone’s Disciplines of Virtue
helps readers understand how adolescent girls became the object
of cultural ideological wars. Angela Estes and Kathleen Lant
show how such ideological tensions lead that prototypical ado-
lescent novel, Little Women, to deconstruct itself as Jo March di-
verts her anger at her culture’s efforts to repress her into self-
immolating anger at herself. Shirley Foster and Judy Simons also
deconstruct Little Women within its historical context: they see the
novel as representative of the ‘‘complexities that underlie essen-
tialist concepts of definitive gendered identity’’ (104). And their
argument — like Vallone’s, like Myers’s, like Estes and Lant’s —
is accessible to students seeking to understand the tensions be-
tween textuality and contextuality.
Deconstructive Readings
It is no accident that much of the historical work done on ado-

lescent literature is performed by revisionist feminists who rely on
deconstructive methodology. Feminists understand that history
has constructed adolescent gender politics in contradictory ways.
Moreover, poststructural poetics allow for informed close read-
ings that foreground such contradictions. And what could be
more appropriate to a body of literature about inherently contra-
dictory people (teenagers) than a literary strategy that surfaces
contradictions? As a result, ya literary theorists have also dis-
covered the relevance of Bakhtinian theory in deconstructing ado-
lescent literature. As I indicated in Chapter 2, two of Bakhtin’s
concepts have almost perfect applicability in adolescent literature
because of the very nature of the field. Maria Nikolajeva (99–102)
and Michael Cadden (‘‘Speaking’’ 516–519) discuss Bakhtin’s con-
cept of dialogic voices, competing narrative voices sometimes re-
ferred to as ‘‘heteroglossia’’ or ‘‘polyphony.’’ Len Hatfield, too, has
noted the complexity of shifting authority at work in such novels
as Tehanu (52). Much of that novel is defined by competing con-
cepts of who Tehanu is, as Cadden points out. Tehanu is at once
child and not-child, dragon and not-dragon; she is wizard and
not-wizard, and Cadden demonstrates how her amorphousness
affects Tenar as the novel’s focalizer (‘‘Dialogues’’ 88 –108).2 One
of the most fun exercises I have yet devised for helping students
access dialogic voices is a role-playing exercise: one group can ar-
gue Tehanu’s position, another Tenar’s, another Ged’s as I pose
varied questions to them. When they have to answer as Ged or as
Tehanu, they discover that each of these characters has more than
one perspective, more than one voice. It is an easy way to define
the difference between the ‘‘monologic’’ and ‘‘polyphony.’’
Michelle Martin shows polyphony at work in the competing
voices that struggle to control most texts of menstrual education.
She also discusses the second Bakhtinian concept I find useful in
the ya classroom: his idea of the ‘‘carnivalesque,’’ as John Ste-
phens applies it to children’s literature:
Carnival laughter is the laughter of all the people. Second, it is
universal in scope; it is directed at all and everyone, including
the carnival’s participants. The entire world is seen in its droll

aspect, in its gay relativity. Third, this laughter is ambivalent: it
is gay, triumphant, and at the same time, mocking, deriding. It
asserts and denies, it buries and revives. (‘‘Rabelais and His
World’’ 200; quoted in Martin, ‘‘Periods,’’ Ph.D. diss. 6)
Martin acknowledges that the Bakhtinian concept of the medieval
grotesque — a dark focus on the corporeal — combines easily
with the carnivalesque in adolescent literature because of adoles-
cents’ extreme anxieties about their physical bodies (‘‘Periods’’ 21).
Martin’s extended reading of the dialogics created by the carni-
valesque grotesque in such novels as Mollie Hunter’s A Sound of
Chariots leaves open myriad possibilities for secondary teachers.
What are the novels that celebrate — and protest — the human
body? What novels both laugh and cry about the vicissitudes of
adolescence? Novelists often dismissed by critics trying to legiti-
mize the field are ripe for such Bakhtinian readings: Judy Blume,
M. E. Kerr, Hadley Irwin, and Richard Peck could all be read as
jesters parodying the adolescent body. Christian Peter Knoeller, in
Voicing Ourselves, advocates such readings and demonstrates how
effectively they can be implemented in high school classrooms.
Francesca Lia Block’s novels intentionally capture competing
dialogues that celebrate and mourn the human body. In Weetzie
Bat, the gay character Duck fears aids but finds solace in making
love with his boyfriend, Dirk; Weetzie wants to get pregnant but
cannot without Max’s support — until she finds another way to
celebrate her fertility and sleeps with both Dirk and Duck. The
moral dilemma Weetzie’s actions create invokes a heteroglossia
found in the culture at large: When Weetzie becomes pregnant,
Max is angry; Dirk and Duck are delighted; and Weetzie herself is
first full of anticipation, ‘‘like an Easter basket of pastel chocolate
malt eggs and solid-milk-chocolate bunnies, and yellow daffodils
and doll-house-sized jelly-bean eggs’’ (48). Later, however, she is
just plain tired as she carries the ‘‘baby she felt rippling inside of
her like a mermaid’’ (50). The text allows her both joy and fatigue,
both pleasure and pain.
If in the process of reading Weetzie Bat students discover that
its ideology is contradictory, then they have discovered both an-
other level of the text’s dialogics and another way to read litera-
ture. Linda Benson draws from John Stephens’s modification of

Genette’s concept of the narrative focalizer when she analyzes the
ideology of the literacy narrative at work in Katherine Paterson’s
Lyddie. Informed by Peter Hollindale, who is in turn informed by
an Althusserian Marxism, Benson demonstrates how much stu-
dents in the adolescent literature classroom have to gain when
they can distinguish explicit ideologies from implicit ideologies.
Less vulnerable to textual manipulation, more self-aware, and
more aware of their students’ ideologies, ideologically trained
readers can deconstruct for themselves the competing ideologies
in Weetzie Bat. Explicitly, the text exhorts societal acceptance of all
love relationships, that we all ‘‘plug into the love current instead’’
(88). But implicitly, the text affirms the status quo, for Block does
not rest easy until everyone in her novels is paired off, two by two,
even if gender and orientation are irrelevant to her dyads. Students
trained to read for competing dialogues intuit that in Block’s nov-
els, ultimately, nothing all that radical really happens.
(Re)visionary Readings
Caroline Hunt notes that one of the most critical foci of the
study of adolescent literature has been our involvement in re-
sponding to notions of canonicity. Anyone in the field necessarily
deals with these issues: ya novels are, by definition, outside the
traditional white male canon. Poststructuralism has given us many
arguments for expanding the canon, and as a result, we have
studies like Nancy Tolson’s ‘‘Regional Outreach and an Evolving
Black Aesthetic’’ that introduced me to Angela Johnson’s Toning
the Sweep in 1994. I have used the novel numerous times since then
to teach two things: historical contextualization (which students
gain as we talk about the Civil Rights movement when one char-
acter is lynched by a racist mob) and feminism (which we talk
about in terms of the female community created by the narrator,
her mother, and her grandmother as they grieve communally the
elder woman’s dying). Several of the strategies I have already dis-
cussed work beautifully as we discuss multicultural narratives
such as those by Virginia Hamilton, Laurence Yep, Walter Dean
Myers, Minfong Ho, or Gary Soto. We can talk about competing
voices — intraracially or interracially. We can talk about compet-

ing ideologies — explicit ones or implicit ones. We can talk about
discourses of power, historical contextualization, how various
multicultural novels create implied readers, aporias and how they
are overcome, or even how the aesthetics in novels by authors
of color are different from and similar to aesthetics by Euro-
American authors.
We also talk about the conjunction between race and gender as
a function of how empowerment is tied to discourse. I encourage
my students to look at all the factors of positive feminism at work
in a novel like Toning the Sweep: not just the female community, but
the narrator’s sense of agency her voice, and her choices (Trites,
Waking Sleeping Beauty 37–39). In more metafictional novels like
Tehanu and Weetzie Bat, we can talk about the self-conscious nar-
rative strategies the author employs to engage the reader in under-
standing her female characters’ power. Lissa Paul’s Reading Other-
ways is a text designed to engage undergraduates in thinking about
feminist theory. I have also found Virginia Schaefer Carroll’s ru-
bric for analyzing feminist fiction particularly effective in the ado-
lescent literature classroom: she investigates how Maureen Daly’s
Seventeenth Summer is about female education, female identify for-
mation, female voice, and female choice (13). After we talk about
how Carol Gilligan’s concept of female identity formation occurs
within a complicated network of interrelationships, we can ana-
lyze these four factors in novels as diverse as Sylvia Engdahl’s
Enchantress from the Stars and Sparks’s It Happened to Nancy. Carroll’s
article provides my students with a key to unlocking the complex
spectrum that ranges from sexism to feminism — and in the
process of the discussions, many of my students, both male and
female, discover to their amusement and sometimes horror that
they are themselves feminists.
Karen Coats’s ‘‘Lacan for Runt Pigs’’ and Roderick McGillis’s
‘‘Another Kick at La/can’’ are comprehensible guides to Lacan-
ian psychoanalytic theory useful to theorists of the ya novel.
Furthermore, Coats’s readings of The Chocolate War and L’Engle’s
A Wrinkle in Time (1962) particularize ya novels as a genre in-
formed by the adolescent’s phallic crisis (‘‘Performing the Sub-
ject’’ 142–176). Kenneth Kidd’s introduction to the fall 1998
Children’s Literature Association Quarterly has a superb introduction
to queer discourse in adolescent literature, and Vanessa Wayne

Lee’s ‘‘ ‘Unshelter Me’ ’’ in the same issue provides an introduction
to lesbian theory and adolescent narratives (152–159). Peter Hol-
lindale’s Signs of Childness in Children’s Books is excellent for —
among other things — its chapter that contains an interesting
reading of adolescent literature. Like many of the Transactional
Critics, Hollindale believes that helping adolescents access litera-
ture can change the world for the better.
The important thing to me in the revolution that has occurred
in the last twenty years of the study of ya literature is the degree
of dialogue that informs the field. Our students have benefited
from this dialogue, and so will their students in turn. I am not
afraid of anyone getting theoretical in the high school classroom.
I am far more afraid of monologic teacher education than I am
of polyphonic teacher education. Our ability to teach theoretically
is revitalizing a once moribund field. Nothing has greater poten-
tial for disturbing the universe of literary criticism for the good
of ourselves, our students, and their students — the adolescent
readers who, when all is said and done, are the ones who matter
most in this dialogue.
Notes
c ha pt er 1
1. This despite Aidan Chambers’ observation that the identity crisis is a

phenomenon of middle age, not adolescence, for adolescents still do not have
a full sense of their own identity (Chambers, ‘‘All of a Tremble’’ 198).
2. Several critics deal with the issue of home in children’s literature. See,
for example, Michael J. Cadden’s ‘‘Home is a Matter of Blood, Time, and
Genre’’; Christopher Clausen’s ‘‘Home and Away in Children’s Fiction’’; Perry
Nodelman’s The Pleasures of Children’s Literature; Jon Stott and Christine Doyle
Francis’s ‘‘ ‘Home’ and ‘Not Home’ in Children’s Stories: Getting There—
and Being Worth It’’; and Lucy Waddey’s ‘‘Homes in Children’s Fiction: Three
Patterns.’’ The third chapter of Cadden’s dissertation, ‘‘Dialogues with Au-
thority: Children’s Literature, Dialogics, and the Texts of Ursula K. Le Guin,’’
provides a summative analysis of these descriptions of the use of home in
children’s literature in terms of ideology and narrative structure. See also his
‘‘Speaking Across the Spaces Between Us.’’
3. Foucault defines all power as a social imperative that invariably produces
something: ‘‘By power, I do not mean ‘Power’ as a group of institutions and
mechanisms that ensure the subservience of the citizens of a given state. By
power, I do not mean, either, a mode of subjugation which, in contrast to
violence, has the form of the rule. Finally, I do not have in mind a general
system of domination exerted by one group over another, a system whose
effects, through successive derivations, pervade the entire social body. . . . It
seems to me that power must be understood in the first instance as the mul-
tiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and
which constitute their own organization; as the process which, through cease-
less struggles and confrontations, transforms, strengthens or reverses them;
as the support which these force relations find in one another . . . and lastly,
as the strategies in which they take effect, whose general design or institutional
crystallization is embodied in the state apparatus, in the formulation of the
law, in the various social hegemonies’’ (History 92–93).
4. Australian sociologist R. W. Connell notes that ‘‘power may be a balance
of advantage or an inequality of resources in a workplace, a household, or a
larger institution’’ (107).
154 : Notes to Pages 5 – 11
5. The concept of subjectivity assumes that every individual is multiply

constructed by a variety of sociolinguistic forces that act on her or him. As-
suming a subject position (as opposed to an object position) is a matter of
engaging one’s agency. (For an assessment of this process that is specific to
children’s and adolescent literature, see Trites, Waking Sleeping Beauty 26–29.)
6. Coats defines ‘‘assomption’’ relying on Lacan’s use of the term as: ‘‘the
taking on oneself the position heretofore merely ascribed to her by the Other’’
(‘‘Performing the Subject’’ 41). For her extended analysis of The Chocolate War,
see ‘‘Performing the Subject’’ 169–174.
7. Kenneth Donelson and Alleen Pace Nilsen somewhat inconsistently de-
fine ya literature in terms of what people between the ‘‘ages of 12 and 20
choose to read (as opposed to what they may be coerced to read for class
assignments),’’ but employ market-driven publishers’ lists to define children’s
literature: ‘‘ When we talk about children’s literature, we refer to books released
by the juvenile or junior divisions of a publisher and intended for children
from prekindergarten to about sixth grade’’ (6).
8. Caroline Hunt (5) and Ben F. Nelms (9) cite 1942 and 1967. Richard
Peck (19–20) and Michael Cart (156) cite 1967. Poe, Samuels, and Carter
name 1968, which they accurately cite as the publication date of The Pigman
and which they inaccurately cite as the publication date of The Outsiders (65).
Geraldine DeLuca defines The Catcher in the Rye as ‘‘the one book that the
adolescent novel comes from’’ (‘‘Unself-Conscious Voices’’ 89). Maria Niko-
lajeva also considers it a ground-breaking novel (66), and Lukens and Cline
describe it as the novel that most completely addresses the issues of adoles-
cent literature (171).
9. Dagmar Grenz provides a perspective on the German adolescent novel
as a genre in which the ‘‘young hero . . . is in the midst of an existential crisis’’
(173).
10. For a thorough overview of the history of youth literature, see Donel-
son and Nilsen (413– 440).
11. See, for example, Brown and Stephens (18).
12. Tennyson consciously collapses the categories of BildungsromanandEnt-
wicklungsroman into one category because he perceives the spiritual element
that the Victorians added to the British Bildungsroman when Romantic opti-
mism began to dissipate as the crucial element of the Victorian Bildungsroman
(144). In the final sentence of a paper he gave in 1968 that fixed the Anglo-
American definition of the novel of development, Tennyson elides the term
Entwicklungsroman with the term Bildungsroman, saying: ‘‘If such a conception
[of uniform spiritual Bildung in the Victorian novel] can be affirmed as the true
common ground of Victorian novels of development, then we have returned
to something close to Dilthey’s concept [of the goal of the Bildungsroman being
a blend of learning to balance the material and the spiritual worlds], and have
found that the English Entwicklungsroman is also the English Bildungsroman’’
(145). The two terms have been used as one more often than not for the thirty
years that followed Tennyson’s presentation.
Notes to Pages 12 – 32 : 155
13. G. B. Tennyson considers the English Bildungsroman ‘‘Victorian rather

than Romantic because it takes its rise from the work in the eighteen-twenties
of that later-to-be eminent Victorian Thomas Carlyle,’’ who translated Wilhelm
Meister into English (139). I am less convinced than Tennyson that Victorian-
ism is a literary phase distinct from Romanticism.
14. See chapter 5 of Linda Benson’s dissertation, ‘‘The Constructed Child,’’
for more on literacy narratives in adolescent literature.
15. The message, a lovely one for modern readers, is perhaps not the most
accurate representation of what a nineteenth-century young woman’s emo-
tional life might have been like.
16. According to Foucault, ‘‘discourse’’ is a concept inseparable from ‘‘lan-
guage’’ as a concept. If language is ‘‘the concrete link between representation
and reflection,’’ then discourse is the ‘‘sequence of verbal signs,’’ the move-
ment between linguistic signs that makes meaning possible (Foucault, Order
83). Thus, ‘‘discourse’’ is the interaction of language systems by means of
which communication occurs.
17. I generally use ‘‘postmodernism’’ to refer to the era and its artistic
products and ‘‘poststructuralism’’ to refer to literary theories that follow
structuralism.
c ha pt er 2
1. Fredric Jameson traces the connection between ideology and Lacan’s

concept of the Symbolic; ideology is inescapable because of our complete
immersion in the Symbolic Order (Postmodernism 53–54).
2. According to Henry Littlefield, Baum was a populist who wrote The
Wonderful Wizard of Oz to reflect his political agendas, such as including silver
along with gold in the monetary base and advocating for workers’ and farmers’
rights. Thus, Littlefield interprets the yellow brick road as bricks of gold; silver
shoes walk on them to lead the way to the Emerald City, the green city of
money, Washington, D.C. (53). In this taxonomy, the Munchkins are little and
blue because they represent the repressed blue-collar workers of the East, and
the Native Americans have been imprisoned as the Winged Monkeys in the
West — whose ills can only be cured by killing the Wicked Witch of the West
with water: irrigation. The scarecrow is the farmer who thinks he does not
have a brain but does; the Tin Woods-man is industry that has eventually
become so mechanized that it is heartless; the Cowardly Lion is William Jen-
nings Bryant, the Populists’ favorite candidate; and the Wizard is the humbug
president of the United States, William McKinley.
3. Isabel Quigly identifies several factors that led to girls’ school stories
being a later literary phenomenon than boys’ school stories, including the fact
that girls’ boarding schools were established in England as a cultural institu-
tion later than boys’ boarding schools and the fact that upper-class girls were
more likely to be educated at home by governesses than were their male coun-
terparts (213). Mitzi Myers’s ‘‘Reading Children and Homeopathic Romanti-

cism’’ (55–56) and Cadogan and Craig’s You’re A Brick, Angela! (111–124) also
add to the discussion of gender in school stories. See also R. Moore (378 –
379) and Richards (2).
4. In ‘‘The Grotesque and the Taboo in Roald Dahl’s Humorous Writings
for Children,’’ Mark West provides a synthesis of Freud’s theory of humor as
it influences several theoreticians exploring humor. See also David Monro’s
Argument of Laughter.
5. Similarly, Nikolajeva perceives children’s literature as a more polyphonic
literature since the 1960s because of an increased cultural awareness of chil-
dren’s subjectivity (99–102).
6. See also Elizabeth Janeway’s Man’s World, Woman’s Place (8 –10); Hélène
Cixous’s ‘‘The Laugh of the Medusa’’; Mary Daly’s Gyn/Ecology (1–22); and
the first chapter of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble.
7. For a standard definition of essentialism see Irena R. Makaryk’s defini-
tion in the Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory: ‘‘the valorization of
‘woman’s’ biological or cultural essence’’ (545).
8. For more on silencing in the Logan family books, see Trites, Waking
Sleeping Beauty 49–51.
c ha pt er 3
1. Karen Coats provides a Lacanian explanation for this process in ‘‘Lacan

with Runt Pigs.’’
2. Marilyn Frye describes how Lacan’s theory is dependent upon Saus-
surean concepts of linguistics: ‘‘the elements [of language] are constituted by
what they are not. Or, even more paradoxically: an element is constituted by
the-absence-of-it. . . . In this world, to be is to be a signifier, and a signifier is
construed as ‘that which is constituted by the-absence-of-it.’ And now, all one
has to do is acknowledge the ‘obvious,’ that the phallus is also ‘that which is
constituted by the contrast with the-absence-of-it,’ and one can see that the
signifier is the phallus and the phallus is the signifier. The subject is a signifier,
so it follows that the subject must be the phallus’’ (994).
3. Marilyn Frye provides an eloquent gender-based critique of Lacan in
‘‘The Necessity of Differences.’’
4. Ann B. Murphy, for example, notes that ‘‘much of Little Women’s power
derives from its exploration of the previously repressed, complex mother-
daughter relationship, without portraying that bond as either idealized perfec-
tion or pernicious destruction’’ (575).
5. For a clear delineation of Jo’s self-evisceration, see Estes and Lant’s
‘‘Dismembering the Text: The Horror of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women.’’
Foster and Simon interpret the infamous hair-cutting scene ‘‘in Freudian
terms as a re-enactment of the experience of female castration. Jo’s recogni-
tion of lack is commensurate with her loss of innocence and exposes her fear
of initiation into adult sexuality’’ (96).
6. Seventeenth Summer has been called the first young adult novel and has
been held responsible for stimulating the publishing industry’s attention to
the genre: ‘‘the adolescent novel as we know it may be said to have sprung
from the popularity and seriousness of Maureen Daly’s Seventeenth Summer’’
(Nelms 9). See the 1992 issue of English Journal (vol. 81, no. 4), which is dedi-
cated to adolescent literature.
7. In fact, as Karen Coats once commented to me, the Demeter-
Persephone myth may be a more appropriate interpretation of both these
novels: Jo views John Brooke as the Hades who has stolen Persephone from
her, and in Seventeenth Summer, Jack serves as the Hades who steals the
Persephone-like Angie for one sensual summer.
8. One of the most positive effects of feminism on adolescent literature is
that female rebellion against present parents has been taken more seriously in
books published since the mid-1980s: Crescent Dragonwagon’s The Year It
Rained and Barbara Wersba’s Love Is the Crooked Thing (1987) demonstrate girls
who rebel against their parents eventually gaining autonomy without denying
their mothers. See Trites, Waking Sleeping Beauty, 89–91, 104 –106.
9. The gender of the parent is not strictly defined; mothers can serve as
symbolic fathers. Melanin Sun’s mother provides one such example.
10. Lacan, of course, would argue that the actual is entirely determined
by the Symbolic Order. As Lacan’s translator Alan Sheridan notes, ‘‘The
symbolic . . . is . . . the determining order of the subject’’ (Écrits ix).
11. The pre-Oedipal stage is the stage when the infant believes itself still
to be in Imaginary oneness with its mother (Lacan, Écrits 1–7, 197–199). For
a concise explanation and an elegant application to another adolescent text,
see Roni Natov’s essay on Annie John.
12. Bob Dixon first asked scholars of children’s and adolescent literature
to investigate textual ideologies in his two-volume work Catching Them Young.
Bob Sutherland also classifies explicit ideology in children’s literature as ‘‘the
politics of advocacy [and] the politics of attack’’ and implicit ideological as-
sumptions as ‘‘the politics of assent’’ (145), but neither Dixon nor Sutherland
complicates the issues of ideology as much as Hollindale does.
13. The text is quite explicit that in groups, teenagers have power that is
both constructive and destructive. Grace needs another teenager to help her
heal because she has been sexually assaulted by a group of her peers.
14. For an assessment of the irony inherent in the use of the first-person
narrator in books written for adolescents, see Michael J. Cadden’s ‘‘Ironic Ten-
sion in the Young Adult Novel.’’
15. See also Susan S. Lanser, ‘‘Toward a Feminist Narratology,’’ and Trites,
‘‘ ‘I double’ ’’ (148 –149).
16. Patrocinio Schweickart demonstrates how patriarchal constructs se-
duce the reading subject into an identity as white, male (and adult) and ad-
vocates feminist counterreadings that do not require the reader to efface her-
self (31– 62).
17. Judith Fetterley advocates that women read as ‘‘resisting’’ readers who
refuse to participate in the totalizing discourse of patriarchal literature (xxii);
black readers who refuse to adopt white subject positions are also resisting
readers.
18. Adolescent novels share with picture books and children’s novels a
history grounded in educating children, so the didactic impulse in many of the
books in these genres is not surprising.
c ha pt er 4
1. As Kate Soper notes: ‘‘It is one thing to argue that we do not have
experience of the body other than as symbolically and culturally mediated; it
is quite another to suggest that bodies are ‘constructed’ out of cultural forces
in the same manner that, say, telephones are put together’’ (32). She points out
two important differences: bodies exist physically before any cultural act has
shaped them, and unlike telephones, bodies are never completely constructed.
They continue to change and grow throughout time, which is where Foucault’s
point about cultural influences becomes, of course, most important (32).
See also Bailey 116; Bartky 64; Ramazanoglu 4 – 8; McNay 3, 11– 47; Weeks
223.
2. Judy Blume’s Deenie (1973) includes a validation of masturbation; her
Then Again, Maybe I Won’t (1971) includes a validation of nocturnal emissions;
her Forever validates teenagers’ desire to have intercourse.
3. Characters in Edith Jackson and My Darling, My Hamburger both undergo
abortions without the support of their male partners.
4. ‘‘Jouissance’’ can be defined as sexual rapture, as an orgasmic experience
that is beyond language.
5. There is a certain irony in my describing L’Engle’s writing in poststruc-
tural terms: L’Engle asserts in A House Like a Lotus that people have a unique
and inherent inner quality that poststructuralism’s insistence on the primacy
of language in determining subjectivity precludes. When Polly’s friend Max
asks her, ‘‘So, what is it, this thing called soul?’’ Polly answers, ‘‘It’s — it’s your
you and my me. . . . It’s what makes us us, different from anybody else in the
world. . . . The soul isn’t — ephemeral’’ (181–182, emphasis in the original).
Max replies, ‘‘So it’s us, at our highest and least self-conscious’’ (182). Their
conversation demonstrates the humanist belief in the inviolability of the hu-
man soul — a concept largely antithetical to poststructuralist theories.
6. Following the impulse of Queer Theory to claim for itself a pejorative
term and transform it into something positive, I refer to ya novels about
characters whose sexual orientation involves same-sex partners as ‘‘queer ya
novels.’’
c ha pt er 5
1. For Heidegger, ‘‘Being-towards-death’’ represents the moment of matu-

ration in which the subject defines himself in terms of his own death, in terms
of his own not being (304 –307). See also Coats, ‘‘Lacan’’ 106.
2. Margaret Atwood’s Bodily Harm (1981), Marilyn French’s Her Mother’s
Daughter (1987), Ann Beattie’s Picturing Will (1989), Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy
(1990), and Amy Tan’s The Hundred Secret Senses (1995), for example, are novels
that depict women developing their own sense of personal power through
photography. Since women’s literature shares with adolescent literature a con-
cern for people who initially feel disempowered but grow into an increased
awareness of what exactly agency entails, it seems natural that the metaphor
of the camera recurs as often in adolescent literature as it does in women’s
literature.
3. In the process of aiding protagonists to explore their agency and achieve
resolution, cameras and photographs provide literary characters with a num-
ber of emotional experiences. Sharon R. Wilson notes that Margaret Atwood
uses photography for four purposes: to give characters ‘‘ ‘neutral’ recorders of
experience’’; to demonstrate ‘‘a character’s sense of fragmentation’’; to pro-
vide that character with ‘‘proof’’ of her own existence; and to provide ‘‘lenses
which distill and focus experience, facilitating a self-discovery which tran-
scends mere ‘self-surveillance’ ’’ (31–32). The three novels I discuss herein
employ these four patterns to varying degrees, but the pattern of photography
as a catalyst for transcendence is the most noteworthy.
4. I share an interest with Barthes and Hirsch in photographs of people
rather than of landscapes or inanimate objects.
5. Barthes writes, ‘‘A specific photograph, in effect, is never distinguished
from its referent (from what it represents), or at least it is not immediately or
generally distinguished from its referent (as is the case for every other image,
encumbered — from the start, and because of its status — by the way in
which the object is simulated): it is not impossible to perceive the photo-
graphic signifier . . . but it requires a secondary action of knowledge or of
reflection’’ (5, emphasis in the original).
6. Hirsch defines it this way: ‘‘The referent is both present (implied in the
photograph) and absent (it has been there but is not here now)’’ (5). Hirsch
even uses photography as the metaphor whereby she explains signification in
language, connecting the process to the fluidity of social power: ‘‘The trian-
gular field in which signifier, signified, and interpreting subject interact in the
process of symbolization is much like the triangular field of the photograph,
in which the photographer, the object, and the viewer interrelate through
imaginary projections they more or less share. Power, in this structure of play,
is not unidimensional or unidirectional: it circulates in multiple ways within
the process of taking, developing, assembling, and reading pictures and within
the social space and the historical moment in which photography operates’’
(176). Barthes’s description of the photograph synthesizes the dichotomy be-

tween signifier and signified that Hirsch is describing: the photograph is for
the viewer, at least initially, signifier and signified, just as it can contain the
paradoxical image of a communicating subject that has become an object (5).
7. Deborah Bowen identifies Sontag’s definition of photography as differ-
ing epistemologically from Barthes’s approach to photography: Sontag views
pictures as a means to an end, as a way of coming to some sort of understand-
ing; Barthes celebrates photos as an end in themselves; he values what the
photograph reveals far more than he values what the photographer or viewer
has learned in the process of taking or observing the picture. As Bowen puts
it, Sontag privileges ‘‘function’’ and Barthes ‘‘form’’ (21).
8. Or, in other terms, her camera is langue, her pictures parole.
9. For a lucid explanation of Lacanian theory as it applies to photography,
see Hirsch (101–103).
10. Photography as elegy is a leitmotif in Hirsch’s Family Frames. Not only
does Hirsch cite this quotation from Barthes (quoted in Hirsch 175), but she
also quotes Marguerite Duras’s statement, ‘‘The fixed, flat, easily available
countenance of a dead person or an infant in a photograph is only one image
as against the million images that exist in the mind. And the sequence made
up by the million images will never alter. It’s a confirmation of death’’ (quoted
in Hirsch 200) and Susan Sontag’s statements: ‘‘All photographs are memento
mori ’’ (quoted in Hirsch 17) and ‘‘this link between photography and death
haunts all photos of people’’ (quoted in Hirsch 19). According to Hirsch,
‘‘The referent [of a photograph] haunts the picture like a ghost: it is a reve-
nant, a return of the lost and dead other’’ (5) and the photographic still is a
‘‘deathlike fixing of one moment in time’’ (24).
11. Julia Kristeva, in fact, links all linguistic constructions, linear as they
are, with death: ‘‘It might also be added that this linear time is that of language
considered as the enunciation of sentences (noun ⫹ verb; topic-comment;
beginning-ending), and that this time rests on its own stumbling block, which
is also the stumbling block of that enunciation — death’’ (17).
12. Brooks bases his theory on Freud’s essay ‘‘Beyond the Pleasure Prin-
ciple,’’ demonstrating how, ‘‘If beginning is desire, and is ultimately desire for
the end, between lies a process’’ that Brooks links to plot production (‘‘Freud’s
Masterplot’’ 284). He maintains that ‘‘the sense of the beginning, then, is de-
termined by the sense of an ending’’ (‘‘Freud’s Masterplot’’ 283), for ‘‘all nar-
ration is obituary in that life acquires definable meaning only at, and through,
death’’ (‘‘Freud’s Masterplot’’ 284). In the revised version of this essay that
appears as a chapter in Reading for the Plot, Brooks embellishes this statement:
‘‘All narrative may be in essence obituary in that . . . the retrospective knowl-
edge that it seeks, the knowledge that comes after, stands on the far side of
the end, in human terms on the far side of death’’ (95). For a trenchant critique
of what is masculinist in Brooks’s argument, see Susan Winnett’s article,
‘‘Coming Unstrung.’’
13. As Peter Brooks says of similar narrative repetitions in Great Expecta-
tions, ‘‘repetition and return have spoken of the death instinct, the drive to
return to the quiescence of the inorganic, of the nontextual. Yet the
repetitions . . . both prolonging the detour and more effectively preparing the
final discharge, have created that delay necessary to incorporate the past
within the present and to let us understand end in relation to beginning’’
(Reading for the Plot 139).
c ha pt er 6
1. Henry Giroux and Steven R. Chisnell have also contributed to this

dialogue.
2. John Stephens employs the term ‘‘focalizer’’ to indicate a narrative per-
sona whose perspective focuses the reader’s attention (27).
Bibliography
li t er a ry w o r k s
Alcott, Louisa May. Little Women. 1868, 1869. Boston: Little, Brown, 1968.
Atwood, Margaret. Bodily Harm. New York: Toronto: McClelland and
Stewart, 1981.
Avi. Nothing but the Truth: A Documentary Novel. New York: Orchard, 1991.
Baum, L. Frank. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. 1900. New York: Dover, 1960.
Beattie, Ann. Picturing Will. New York: Random House, 1989.
Bennett, James. I Can Hear the Mourning Dove. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin,
1990.
Block, Francesca Lia. Baby Be-Bop. New York: HarperCollins, 1995.
———. The Hanged Man. New York: HarperCollins, 1994.
———. Weetzie Bat. New York: HarperCollins, 1989.
———. Witch Baby. New York: HarperCollins, 1991.
Blume, Judy. Deenie. Scarsdale, N.Y.: Bradbury, 1973.
———. Forever. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975.
———. Then Again, Maybe I Won’t. Scarsdale, N.Y.: Bradbury, 1971.
Brooks, Bruce. The Moves Make the Man. New York: Harper and Row, 1984.
Chambers, Aidan. Breaktime. New York: Harper and Row, 1978.
———. Dance on My Grave. New York: Harper and Row, 1982.
Chbosky, Stephen. The Perks of Being a Wallflower. New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1999.
Clemens, Samuel. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. 1885. New York: Signet,
1959.
Collier, James Lincoln, and Christopher Collier. My Brother Sam Is Dead. New
York: Scholastic, 1974.
Conford, Ellen. To All My Fans, with Love, from Sylvie. Boston: Little, Brown,
1982.
Cormier, Robert. The Chocolate War. New York: Dell, 1974.
———. I Am the Cheese. New York: Dell, 1977.
Cross, Gillian. Pictures in the Dark. New York: Holiday House, 1996.
Crutcher, Chris. Ironman. New York: Greenwillow, 1995.
———. Running Loose. New York: Greenwillow, 1983.
164 : Bibliography
———. Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes. 1993. New York: Dell, 1995.
Daly, Maureen. Seventeenth Summer. New York: Dodd, 1942.
Donovan, John. I’ll Get There. It Better Be Worth the Trip. New York: Harper
and Row, 1969.
Dragonwagon, Crescent. The Year It Rained. New York: Macmillan, 1985.
Eliot, T. S. ‘‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.’’ The Complete Poems and
Plays, 1909–1950. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1952.
Engdahl, Sylvia. Enchantress from the Stars. New York: Atheneum, 1970.
Forbes, Esther. Johnny Tremain. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1943.
Frank, Anne. Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl. Garden City, N.Y.:
Doubleday, 1952.
French, Marilyn. Her Mother’s Daughter. New York: Summit, 1987.
Garden, Nancy. Good Moon Rising. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1996.
Grimsley, Jim. Dream Boy. Chapel Hill: Algonquin, 1995.
Guy, Rosa. Edith Jackson. New York: Viking, 1978.
Hamilton, Virginia. Arilla Sun Down. New York: Greenwillow, 1976.
———. The Gathering. New York: Greenwillow, 1981.
———. M. C. Higgins, the Great. New York: Macmillan, 1974.
———. The Planet of Junior Brown. New York: Macmillan, 1971.
———. A White Romance. New York: Philomel, 1987.
Hesse, Karen. Out of the Dust. New York: Scholastic, 1997.
Hinton, S. E. The Outsiders. New York: Dell, 1967.
———. That Was Then, This Is Now. New York: Dell, 1971.
Hunter, Mollie. A Sound of Chariots. New York: Harper and Row, 1972.
Irwin, Hadley. Abby, My Love. New York: Atheneum, 1985.
Johnson, Angela. Toning the Sweep. New York: Orchard, 1993.
Kerr, M. E. Deliver Us from Evie. New York: HarperCollins, 1994.
———. Is That You, Miss Blue? New York: Harper and Row, 1975.
———. What I Really Think of You. New York: Signet, 1982.
Kincaid, Jamaica. Annie John. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1983.
———. Lucy. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1990.
Klein, Norma. It’s OK if You Don’t Love Me. New York: Dial, 1977.
Knowles, John. A Separate Peace. New York: Macmillan, 1959.
Krisher, Trudy. Spite Fences. New York: Delacorte, 1994.
Larsen, Nella. Passing. New York: Knopf, 1929.
Lee, Harper. To Kill a Mockingbird. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1960.
Le Guin, Ursula K. The Beginning Place. New York: Harper and Row, 1980.
———. Tehanu. New York: Macmillan, 1990.
———. A Wizard of Earthsea. 1968. New York: Bantam, 1975.
L’Engle, Madeleine. A House Like a Lotus. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux,
1984.
———. A Swiftly Tilting Planet. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1978.
———. A Wrinkle in Time. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1962.
Lowry, Lois. The Giver. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1993.
Bibliography : 165
———. Number the Stars. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1989.

———. A Summer to Die. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1977.
Mahy, Margaret. The Changeover. New York: Scholastic, 1984.
Marshall, Catherine. Christy. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967.
Myers, Walter Dean. Scorpions. New York: Harper and Row, 1988.
O’Dell, Scott. Island of the Blue Dolphins. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1960.
Paterson, Katherine. Bridge to Terabithia. New York: Harper and Row, 1977.
———. The Great Gilly Hopkins. New York: Crowell, 1978.
———. Lyddie. New York: Dutton, 1991.
Pinkwater, Daniel. Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars. New York: Dutton, 1979.
Pohl, Peter. Johnny, My Friend. 1985. Trans. Laurie Thompson. London:
Turton and Chambers, 1991.
Potok, Chaim. The Chosen. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967.
Rowling, J. K. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. New York: Scholastic,
1998.
———. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. New York: Scholastic, 1999.
———. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. New York: Scholastic, 1997.
Salinger, J. D. The Catcher in the Rye. Boston: Little, Brown, 1951.
Sleator, William. House of Stairs. New York: Dutton, 1974.
Smith, Betty. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1943.
Sparks, Beatrice. Go Ask Alice. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1971.
———. It Happened to Nancy. New York: Avon, 1994.
Tan, Amy. The Hundred Secret Senses. New York: Putnam, 1995.
Taylor, Mildred. The Road to Memphis. New York: Dial, 1990.
Townsend, Sue. The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 3⁄4. New York: Avon,
1982.
Voigt, Cynthia. David and Jonathan. New York: Scholastic, 1992.
———. Dicey’s Song. New York: Atheneum, 1982.
———. On Fortune’s Wheel. New York: Fawcett Juniper, 1990.
———. The Homecoming. New York: Atheneum, 1981.
———. When She Hollers. New York: Scholastic, 1994.
Webster, Jean. Daddy-Long-Legs. 1912. New York: Puffin, 1989.
Wersba, Barbara. Love Is the Crooked Thing. New York: Harper and Row, 1987.
Wilder, Laura Ingalls. The Little Town on the Prairie. Eau Claire, Wisc.: Hale,
1941.
———. The Long Winter. Eau Claire, Wisc.: Hale, 1940.
Wollstonecraft, Mary. Original Stories from Real Life. 1791. New York:
Woodstock, 1990.
Woodson, Jacqueline. From the Notebooks of Melanin Sun. New York:
Scholastic, 1995.
Yep, Laurence. Dragonwings. New York: Harper and Row, 1975.
Zindel, Paul. David and Della. New York: HarperCollins, 1993.
———. My Darling, My Hamburger. New York: Harper and Row, 1969.
———. The Pigman. New York: Bantam, 1968.
166 : Bibliography
c r i t i c a l w o r ks
Abel, Elizabeth, Marianne Hirsch, and Elizabeth Langland. The Voyage In:
Fictions of Female Development. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New
England, 1983.
Althusser, Louis. ‘‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.’’ In Lenin and
Philosophy and Other Essays, translated by Ben Brewster, 127–186. New
York: Monthly Review P, 1971.
Ammon, Richard. ‘‘Last Rites for the Young Adult Novel.’’ Journal of
Children’s Literature 21.1 (1995): 61– 62.
Angelotti, Michael. ‘‘ Will There Be an Adolescent Literature in the 21st
Century?’’ ALAN Review 7 (1979): 2.
Ariès, Philippe. Western Attitudes to Death from the Middle Ages to the Present.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1974.
Aronson, Marc. ‘‘ ‘The YA Novel is Dead’ and Other Fairly Stupid Tales.’’
School Library Journal ( January 1995): 36–37.
Bailey, M. E. ‘‘Foucauldian Feminism: Contesting Bodies, Sexuality and
Identity.’’ In Up Against Foucault: Explorations of Some Tensions between
Foucault and Feminism, edited by Caroline Ramazanoglu, 99–122. New
York: Routledge, 1993.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin. Edited
by Michael Holquist and translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael
Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981.
———. ‘‘Rabelais and His World.’’ The Bakhtin Reader. Edited by Pam
Morris, 195–206. New York: Routledge, 1994.
Banta, Martha. Imaging American Women: Idea and Ideals in Cultural History. New
York: Columbia UP, 1987.
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by
Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981.
Bartky, Sandra Lee. ‘‘Foucault, Femininity and the Modernisation of
Patriarchal Power.’’ In Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance, edited
by Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby, 61– 86. Boston: Northeastern UP,
1988.
Bedell, Madelon. The Alcotts: Biography of a Family. New York: Potter, 1980.
Belsey, Catharine. ‘‘Constructing the Subject: Deconstructing the Text.’’ In
Feminist Criticism and Social Change, edited by J. Newton and D. Rosenfelt,
45– 64. London: Methuen, 1985.
Bennett, Tony. Formalism and Marxism. London: Methuen, 1979.
Benson, Linda. ‘‘The Constructed Child: Femininity in Beverly Cleary’s
Ramona Series.’’ Ph.D. diss., Illinois State University, 1997.
Bergman, David. Gaiety Transfigured: Gay Self-Representation in American
Literature. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1991.
Bishop, Rudine Sims. ‘‘Books from Parallel Cultures: Celebrating a Silver
Anniversary.’’ Horn Book (March-April 1993): 175– 81.
Bibliography : 167
Blume, Judy. Letters to Judy: What Your Kids Wish They Could Tell You. New
York: Putnam, 1986.
Bowen, Deborah. ‘‘In Camera: The Developed Photographs of Margaret
Laurence and Alice Munro.’’ Studies in Canadian Literature 13 (1988):
20 –33.
Brooks, Peter. ‘‘Freud’s Masterplot.’’ Yale French Studies 55/56 (1977): 280 –
300.
———. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. New York:
Knopf, 1984.
Brown, Jean E., and Elaine C. Stephens. Teaching Young Adult Literature:
Sharing the Connection. Belmont: Wadsworth, 1995.
Buckley, Jerome. Season of Youth: The Bildungsroman from Dickens to Golding.
Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1974.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London:
Routledge, 1990.
———. The Psychic Life of Power. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997.
Cadden, Michael J. ‘‘Dialogues with Authority: Children’s Literature,
Dialogics, and the Texts of Ursula K. Le Guin.’’ Ph.D. diss., Illinois State
University, 1996.
———. ‘‘Home is a Matter of Blood, Time, and Genre: Essentialism in
Burnett and McKinley.’’ ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature
28.1 ( January 1997): 53– 67.
———. ‘‘Ironic Tension in the Young Adult Novel.’’ Midwest Modern
Language Association, St. Louis, November 5, 1998.
———. ‘‘Speaking Across the Spaces Between Us: Ursula Le Guin’s
Dialogic Use of Character in Children’s and Adult Literature.’’ Paradoxa:
Studies in World Literary Genres 2 (1996): 516–530.
Cadogan, Mary, and Patricia Craig. You’re a Brick, Angela! A New Look at Girls’
Fiction from 1839 to 1975. London: Gollancz, 1976.
Campbell, Patricia J. Presenting Robert Cormier. Boston: Twayne, 1985.
Carroll, Virginia Schaefer. ‘‘Re-Reading the Romance of Seventeenth Summer.’’
Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 21 (1996): 12–19.
Cart, Michael. ‘‘Of Risk and Revelation: The Current State of Young Adult
Literature.’’ Journal of Youth Services in Libraries 8 (1995): 151–164.
Chambers, Aidan. ‘‘All of a Tremble to See His Danger.’’ Signal 51
(September 1986): 193–212.
———. ‘‘The Reader in the Book.’’ Signal 23 (May 1977). Reprinted in
Aidan Chambers, Booktalk: Occasional Writing on Literature and Children,
34 –58. London: Bodley Head, 1985.
Chatman, Seymour. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film.
Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell UP, 1978.
Chisnell, Steven R. ‘‘Language and Meaning in the Postmodern Classroom.’’
English Journal 82 (1993): 53–58.
Cixous, Hélène. ‘‘The Laugh of the Medusa.’’ Signs 1 (summer 1976): 875– 893.
168 : Bibliography
Clark, Beverly Lyon. Regendering the School Story: Sassy Sissies and Tattling Tomboys.
New York: Garland, 1996.
Clausen, Christopher. ‘‘Home and Away in Children’s Fiction.’’ Children’s
Literature 10 (1982): 141–152.
Coats, Karen. ‘‘Lacan with Runt Pigs.’’ Children’s Literature 27 (1999): 105–128.
———. ‘‘Performing the Subject of Children’s Literature.’’ Ph.D. diss.,
George Washington University, 1998.
Compton, Mary F., and Juanita Skelton. ‘‘A Study of Selected Adolescent
Problems as Presented in Contemporary Realistic Fiction for Middle
School Students.’’ Adolescence 17 (fall 1982): 637– 645.
Connell, R. W. Gender and Power: Society, the Person, and Sexual Politics. Stanford:
Stanford UP, 1987.
Dalsimer, Katherine. Female Adolescence: Psychoanalytic Reflections on Works of
Literature. New Haven: Yale UP, 1986.
Daly, Mary. Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism. 1978. Boston:
Beacon, 1990.
DeLuca, Geraldine. ‘‘Taking True Risks: Controversial Issues in New Young
Adult Novels.’’ Lion and the Unicorn 3 (1979): 125–148.
———. ‘‘Unself-Conscious Voices: Larger Contexts for Adolescents.’’ Lion
and the Unicorn 2.2 (1978): 89–108.
DeLuca, Geraldine, and Roni Natov. ‘‘An Interview with Robert Cormier.’’
Lion and the Unicorn 2.2 (1978): 109–135.
Dixon, Bob. Political Ideas in Children’s Fiction. Vol. 2 of Catching Them Young.
London: Pluto, 1977.
———. Sex, Race, and Class in Children’s Fiction. Vol. 1 of Catching Them Young.
London: Pluto, 1977.
Dollimore, Jonathan. ‘‘The Dominant and the Deviant: A Violent Dialectic.’’
Critical Quarterly 28 (1986): 179–192. Reprinted in Homosexual Themes in
Literary Studies, edited by Wayne R. Dynes and Stephen Donaldson, 87–
100. New York: Garland, 1992.
Donelson, Kenneth L., and Alleen Pace Nilsen. Literature for Today’s Young
Adults. 5th ed. New York: Longman, 1997.
Eagleton, Terry. Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory.
London: Redwood, 1975.
Ecroyd, Catherine Ann. ‘‘Growing Up Female.’’ ALAN Review 17 (1989):
5– 8.
English Journal. ‘‘Adolescent Literature Comes of Age: From Little Women to
Forever.’’ 81.4 (April 1992).
Estes, Angela M., and Kathleen M. Lant. ‘‘Dismembering the Text: The
Horror of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women.’’ Children’s Literature 17
(1989): 98 –123.
Fellman, Anita Clair. ‘‘ ‘Don’t Expect to Depend on Anybody Else’: The
Frontier as Portrayed in the Little House Books.’’ Children’s Literature 24
(1996): 101–116.
Bibliography : 169
Fetterley, Judith. The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction.

Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1978.
Fiedler, Leslie. ‘‘Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey!’’ Reprinted in
The Collected Essays of Leslie Fiedler, vol. 1, 142–151. New York: Stein and
Day, 1971.
Fink, Bruce. The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance. Princeton:
Princeton UP, 1995.
Fish, Stanley. Is There a Text in This Class? Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1982.
Ford, Elizabeth A. ‘‘H/Z: Why Lesléa Newman Makes Heather into Zoe.’’
Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 23 (1998): 128 –133.
Foster, Shirley, and Judy Simons. What Katy Read: Feminist Re-Readings of
‘‘Classic’’ Stories for Girls. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1995.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by
Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1979.
———. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Volume I. Translated by
Robert Hurley. 1978. New York: Vintage, 1990.
———. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. 1966. New
York: Random House, 1970.
———. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977. Edited
by Colin Gordon. New York: Pantheon, 1980.
———. ‘‘ What Is an Author?’’ In Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected
Essays and Interviews, edited by Donald F. Bouchard and translated by
Bouchard and Sherry Simon, 113–138. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell UP,
1977.
French, Marilyn. Beyond Power: On Women, Men, and Morals. New York:
Summit, 1985.
Frye, Marilyn. ‘‘The Necessity of Differences: Constructing a Positive
Category of Women.’’ Signs 21 (1996): 991-1010.
Fuoss, Kirk. ‘‘A Portrait of the Adolescent as a Young Gay: The Politics
of Male Homosexuality in Young Adult Fiction.’’ In Queer Words, Queer
Images: Communication and the Construction of Homosexuality, edited by
R. Jeffrey Ringer, 159–174. New York: New York UP, 1994.
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American
Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford UP, 1988.
Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Translated by
Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell UP, 1980. Translation of ‘‘Discours
du recit’’ from Figures 3 (Paris: Seuil, 1972).
Gilligan, Carol. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development.
Giroux, Henry A. ‘‘Rethinking the Boundaries of Educational Discourse:
Modernism, Postmodernism, and Feminism.’’ College Literature 17 (1990):
1–50.
———. ‘‘Slacking Off: Border Youth and Postmodern Education.’’ Journal
of Advanced Composition 14 (1994): 347–366.
170 : Bibliography
Grenz, Dagmar. ‘‘Literature for Young People and the Novel of

Adolescence.’’ In Aspects and Issues in the History of Children’s Literature,
edited by Maria Nikolajeva, 173–182. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood,
1995.
Hall, G. Stanley. Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Anthropology,
Sociology, Sex Crime, Religion, and Education. 2 vols. New York: Appleton,
1905.
Hatfield, Len. ‘‘From Master to Brother: Shifting the Balance of Authority
in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Farthest Shore and Tehanu.’’ Children’s Literature 21
(1993): 43– 65.
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. 1927. Translated by John Macquarrie and
Edward Robinson. New York: Harper and Row, 1962.
Henderson, Mae Gwendolyn. ‘‘Speaking in Tongues: Dialogics, Dialectics,
and the Black Woman Writer’s Literary Tradition.’’ In Changing Our Own
Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory, and Writing by Black Women, edited by
Cheryl A. Wall, 16–37. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1989.
Hirsch, Marianne. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory.
Hollindale, Peter. ‘‘The Adolescent Novel of Ideas.’’ Children’s Literature in
Education 26 (1995): 83–95. Reprinted in Only Connect: Readings on
Children’s Literature, 3d ed., edited by Sheila Egoff, Gordon Stubbs, Ralph
Ashley, and Wendy Sutton, 315–326. New York: Oxford UP, 1996.
———. ‘‘Ideology and the Children’s Book.’’ Signal 55 (1988): 3–22.
———. Signs of Childness in Children’s Books. Stroud, Glos., England: Thimble
Press, 1997.
Howe, Susanne. Wilhelm Meister and His English Kinsmen: Apprentices to Life.
1930. New York: AMS Press, 1966.
Hunt, Caroline. ‘‘Young Adult Literature Evades the Theorists.’’ Children’s
Literature Association Quarterly 21 (1996): 4 –11.
Hunt, Peter. Criticism, Theory, and Children’s Literature. Cambridge: Basil
Blackwell, 1991.
Iser, Wolfgang. Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins UP, 1980.
Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act.
Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell UP, 1981.
———. Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, N.C.:
Duke UP, 1991.
Janeway, Elizabeth. Man’s World, Woman’s Place: A Study in Social Mythology. New
York: Morrow, 1971.
Jenkins, Christine. ‘‘Heartthrobs & Heartbreaks: A Guide to Young Adult
Books with Gay Themes.’’ Out/Look (1988): 82–92. Reprinted in
Homosexual Themes in Literary Studies, edited by Wayne R. Dynes and
Stephen Donaldson, 180 –191. New York: Garland, 1992.
Johnson, Barbara. A World of Difference. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987.
Bibliography : 171
Kett, Joseph F. Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America, 1790 to the Present. New
York: Basic, 1977.
Keyser, Elizabeth. Whispers in the Dark: The Fiction of Louisa May Alcott.
Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1993.
Kidd, Kenneth. ‘‘Introduction: Lesbian/Gay Literature for Children and
Young Adults.’’ Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 23 (1998): 114 –119.
Knoeller, Christian P. Voicing Ourselves: Whose Words We Use When We Talk
about Books. Albany: State U of New York P, 1998.
Kornfeld, Eve, and Susan Jackson. ‘‘The Female Bildungsroman in
Nineteenth-Century America: Parameters of a Vision.’’ Journal of American
Culture 10.4 (1987): 69–75.
Kraus, W. Keith. ‘‘Still Dreaming and Losing.’’ School Library Journal 21
( January 1975): 18 –22.
Kristeva, Julia. ‘‘ Women’s Time.’’ Signs 7 (1981): 13–35.
Kübler-Ross, Elisabeth. On Death and Dying. New York: Macmillan, 1969.
Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: A Selection. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York:
Norton, 1977.
———. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. Translated by Alan
Sheridan and edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. New York: Norton, 1978.
———. ‘‘Science and Truth.’’ Newsletter of the Freudian Field 3 (1989): 4 –29.
Lanser, Susan S. ‘‘Toward a Feminist Narratology.’’ Style 20.3 (fall 1986):
341–363.
Lawrence-Pietroni, Anna. ‘‘The Tricksters, The Changeover, and the Fluidity of
Adolescent Literature.’’ Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 21 (1996):
34 –39.
Lee, Vanessa Wayne. ‘‘ ‘Unshelter Me’: The Emerging Fictional Adolescent
Lesbian.’’ Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 23 (1998): 152–159.
Lesnik-Oberstein, Karı́n. Children’s Literature: Criticism and the Fictional Child.
Oxford: Clarendon, 1994.
Linn, Ray. A Teacher’s Introduction to Postmodernism. Urbana, Ill.: National
Council of Teachers of English, 1996.
Littlefield, Henry M. ‘‘The Wizard of Oz: Parable on Populism.’’ American
Quarterly 16 (1964): 47–58.
Lukens, Rebecca J. ‘‘From Salinger to Cormier: Disillusionment to Despair
in Thirty Years.’’ ALAN Review 9 (1981): 42.
Lukens, Rebecca J., and Ruth K. J. Cline. A Critical Handbook of Literature for
Young Adults. New York: HarperCollins, 1995.
MacLeod, Anne Scott. ‘‘Robert Cormier and the Adolescent Novel.’’
Children’s Literature in Education 12 (1981): 74 – 81.
Makaryk, Irena R. Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory: Approaches,
Scholars, Terms. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1993.
Martin, Michelle H. ‘‘Periods, Parody, and Polyphony: Fifty Years of
Menstrual Education through Fiction and Film.’’ Children’s Literature
Association Quarterly 22 (1997): 21–29.
172 : Bibliography
———. ‘‘Periods, Parody, and Polyphony: Ideology and Heteroglossia in

Menstrual Education.’’ Ph.D. diss., Illinois State University, 1997.
May, Jill P. Children’s Literature and Critical Theory: Reading and Writing for
Understanding. New York: Oxford UP, 1995.
McGillis, Roderick. ‘‘Another Kick at La/can: ‘I Am a Picture.’ ’’ Children’s
Literature Association Quarterly 20 (1995): 42– 46.
———. The Nimble Reader: Literary Theory and Children’s Literature. New York:
Twayne, 1996.
McGowan, John. ‘‘Postmodernism.’’ In Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory
and Criticism, edited by Michael Groden and Martin Kreiswirth, 585–587.
———. Postmodernism and Its Critics. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell UP, 1991.
McNay, Lois. Foucault and Feminism: Power, Gender and the Self. Boston:
Northeastern UP, 1992.
Mikkelsen, Nina. ‘‘A Conversation with Virginia Hamilton.’’ Journal of Youth
Services in Libraries 7 (1994): 382– 405.
———. Virginia Hamilton. New York: Twayne, 1994.
Mo, Wei-Min, and Wenju Shen. ‘‘The Twenty-Four Paragons of Filial Piety:
Their Didactic Role and Impact on Children’s Lives.’’ Children’s Literature
Monro, David. Argument of Laughter. Carlton, Victoria, Australia: Melbourne
UP, 1951.
Moore, Opal, and Donnarae MacCann. ‘‘The Uncle Remus Travesty, Part II:
Julius Lester and Virginia Hamilton.’’ Children’s Literature Association
Quarterly 11 (1996): 205–210.
Moore, Rebecca Cabell. ‘‘Boarding School Books: A Unique Literary
Opportunity.’’ Journal of Youth Services in Libraries 6 (1993): 378 –386.
Murphy, Ann B. ‘‘The Borders of Ethical, Erotic, and Artistic Possibilities in
Little Women.’’ Signs 15 (1990): 562–585.
Myers, Mitzi. ‘‘Impeccable Governesses, Rational Dames, and Moral
Mothers: Mary Wollstonecraft and the Female Tradition in Georgian
Children’s Books.’’ Children’s Literature 14 (1986): 31–59.
———. ‘‘Reading Children and Homeopathic Romanticism: Paradigm Lost,
Revisionary Gleam, or ‘Plus Ça Change, Plus C’est La Même Chose’?’’ In
Literature and the Child: Romantic Continuations, Postmodern Contestations,
edited by James Holt McGavran, 44 – 84. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1999.
Natov, Roni. ‘‘Mothers and Daughters: Jamaica Kincaid’s Pre-Oedipal
Narrative.’’ Children’s Literature 18 (1990): 1–16.
Nelms, Ben F. ‘‘From Little Women to Forever.’’ English Journal (April 1992): 9,
11.
Nikolajeva, Maria. Children’s Literature Comes of Age: Toward a New Aesthetic.
New York: Garland, 1996.
Nodelman, Perry. ‘‘Balancing Acts: Noteworthy American Fiction.’’ In
Touchstones: Reflections on the Best in Children’s Literature, vol. 3., edited by
Bibliography : 173
Perry Nodelman, 164 –171. West Lafayette: Children’s Literature

Association, 1989.
———. ‘‘How Typical Children Read Typical Books.’’ Children’s Literature in
Education 12 (1977): 177–185.
———. The Pleasures of Children’s Literature. 2d ed. New York: Addison-
Wesley, 1995.
———. ‘‘Robert Cormier Does a Number.’’ Children’s Literature in Education
14 (1983): 94 –103.
Olson, Marilynn. ‘‘In the Throes of Definition.’’ Children’s Literature
Orenstein, Peggy. School Girls: Young Women, Self-Esteem, and the Confidence Gap.
1994. New York: Anchor, 1995.
Paul, Lissa. ‘‘Enigma Variations: What Feminist Theory Knows about
Children’s Literature.’’ Signal 54 (1987): 186–201.
———. Reading Otherways. Stroud, Glos., England: Thimble Press, 1998.
Peck, Richard. ‘‘The Silver Anniversary of Young Adult Books.’’ Journal of
Youth Services in Libraries 7 (1993): 19–23.
Pirie, Bruce. Reshaping High School English. Urbana, Ill.: National Council of
Teachers of English, 1997.
Poe, Elizabeth Ann, Barbara G. Samuels, and Betty Carter. ‘‘Twenty-Five
Years of Research in Young Adult Literature: Past Perspectives and
Future Directions.’’ Journal of Youth Services in Libraries 7 (1993): 65–73.
Pratt, Annis. Archetypal Patterns in Women’s Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana UP,
1981.
Quigly, Isabel. The Heirs of Tom Brown: The English School Story. London: Chatto
and Windus, 1982.
Ramazanoglu, Caroline. Introduction to Up against Foucault: Explorations of
Some Tensions between Foucault and Feminism. Edited by Caroline
Ramazanoglu, 1–25. New York: Routledge, 1993.
Richards, Jeffrey. ‘‘The School Story.’’ In Stories and Society: Children’s Literature
in its Social Context, edited by Dennis Butts, 1–21. London: Macmillan,
1992.
Rose, Jacqueline. The Case of Peter Pan, or the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction.
London: Macmillan, 1984.
Russell, David L. ‘‘The Comic Spirit and Cosmic Order in Children’s
Literature.’’ Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 15 (1990): 117–119.
Saussure, Ferdinand de. Course in General Linguistics. 1915. New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1966.
Schwartz, Sheila. Teaching Adolescent Literature: A Humanistic Approach. Rochelle
Park, N.J.: Hayden, 1979.
Schweickart, Patrocinio P. ‘‘Reading Ourselves: Toward a Feminist Theory
of Reading.’’ In Gender and Reading: Essays on Readers, Texts, and Contexts,
edited by Elizabeth A. Flynn and Patrocinio P. Schweickart, 31– 62.
174 : Bibliography
Small, Robert C., Jr. ‘‘The Literary Value of the Young Adult Novel.’’ Journal
of Youth Services in Libraries 6 (1992): 277–285.
Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1973.
Soper, Kate. ‘‘Productive Contradictions.’’ In Up Against Foucault:
Explorations of Some Tensions between Foucault and Feminism, edited by
Caroline Ramazanoglu, 99–122. New York: Routledge, 1993.
Spacks, Patricia Meyer. The Adolescent Idea: Myths of Youth and the Adult
Imagination. New York: Basic, 1981.
Steig, Michael. ‘‘Never Going Home: Reflections on Reading, Adulthood,
and the Possibility of Children’s Literature.’’ Children’s Literature Association
Quarterly 18 (1993): 36–39.
Stephens, John. Language and Ideology in Children’s Fiction. New York:
Longman, 1992.
Stock, Patricia Lambert. ‘‘Post-Modern Scholarship: Contributions from a
Practice Profession.’’ English Education 28 (1996): 227–251.
Stott, Jon C., and Christine Doyle Francis. ‘‘ ‘Home’ and ‘Not Home’ in
Children’s Stories: Getting There—and Being Worth It.’’ Children’s
Literature in Education 24 (1993): 223–233.
Susina, Jan. ‘‘The Chocolate War and the Sweet Science.’’ Children’s Literature in
Education 22 (1991): 169–177.
Sutherland, Robert D. ‘‘Hidden Persuaders: Political Ideologies in Literature
for Children.’’ Children’s Literature in Education 16 (1985): 143–157.
Tarr, C. Anita. ‘‘Does The Chocolate War Still Exemplify ya Lit? Did It Ever?
Or, I Come to Bury Cormier, Not to Praise Him.’’ Midwest Modern
Language Association, Chicago, November 5, 1997.
———. ‘‘An Unintentional System of Gaps: A Phenomenological Reading
of Scott O’Dell’s Island of the Blue Dolphins.’’ Children’s Literature in Education
28 (1997): 61–71.
Tennyson, G. B. ‘‘The Bildungsroman in Nineteenth-Century English
Literature.’’ In Medieval Epic to the ‘‘Epic Theater’’ of Brecht, edited by
Rosario P. Armato and John M. Spalek, 135–146. Los Angeles: U of
Southern California P, 1968.
Tolson, Nancy D. ‘‘Regional Outreach and an Evolving Black Aesthetic.’’
Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 20 (1995–1996): 183–185.
Travis, Molly Abel. ‘‘Beloved and Middle Passage: Race, Narrative, and the
Critic’s Essentialism.’’ Narrative 2 (1994): 179–200.
Trites, Roberta Seelinger. ‘‘ ‘I double never ever never lie to my chil’ren’:
Inside People in Virginia Hamilton’s Narratives.’’ African American Review
32 (1998): 147–157.
———. ‘‘Theories and Possibilities of Adolescent Literature.’’ Children’s
Literature Association Quarterly 21 (1996): 2–3.
———. Waking Sleeping Beauty: Feminist Voices in Children’s Novels. Iowa City:
U of Iowa P, 1997.
Vallone, Lynne. Disciplines of Virtue: Girls’ Culture in the Eighteenth and
Nineteenth Centuries. New Haven: Yale UP, 1995.
Bibliography : 175
Vandergrift, Kay E. Mosaics of Meaning: Enhancing the Intellectual Life of Young

Adults through Story. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow, 1996.
Waddey, Lucy E. ‘‘Homes in Children’s Fiction: Three Patterns.’’ Children’s
Weber, Max. Max Weber on Law in Economy and Society. Edited by Max
Rheinstein and translated by Edward Shils. Cambridge: Harvard UP,
1966.
Weeks, Jeffrey. Sexuality and Its Discontents: Meanings, Myths and Modern
Sexualities. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985.
West, Cornel. Keeping Faith: Philosophy and Race in America. New York:
Routledge, 1993.
West, Mark I. ‘‘The Grotesque and the Taboo in Roald Dahl’s Humorous
Writings for Children.’’ Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 15 (1990):
115–116.
White, Barbara A. Growing Up Female: Adolescent Girlhood in American Fiction.
Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1985.
Wiegman, Robyn. American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender. Durham,
N.C.: Duke UP, 1995.
Wilson, Sharon R. ‘‘Camera Images in Margaret Atwood’s Novels.’’ In
Margaret Atwood: Reflection and Reality, edited by Beatrice Mendez-Egle and
James M. Haule, 29–57. Edinburg, Tex.: Pan American University, 1987.
Winnett, Susan. ‘‘Coming Unstrung: Women, Men, Narrative, and Principles
of Pleasure.’’ PMLA 105 (1990): 505–518.
Wood, Naomi. ‘‘Introduction: Children’s Literature and Religion.’’ Children’s
Yoshida, Junko. ‘‘The Quest for Masculinity in The Chocolate War : Changing
Conceptions of Masculinity in the 1970s.’’ Children’s Literature 26 (1998):
105–122.
Index
Abby, My Love. See Irwin, Hadley Alice in Wonderland. See Carroll, Lewis
Abel, Elizabeth, 12–13 Althusser, Louis, 4, 22, 24, 150
absence, textual, 23, 45–52, 53. See American Library Association, 7, 9
also aporia ancestor worship, 41– 43
adolescence, ix–xiii, 1, 7, 11, 19–20, androgyny, 25, 47
83, 135–136, 149; and economics, Anne of Green Gables. See Montgomery,
xi, 8 –9; history of 8 –9. See also L. M.
identity politics Annie John. See Kincaid, Jamaica
Adolescence. See Hall, G. Stanley aporia, 41, 151. See also voice,
adolescent literature, defined 2, 7– 8, silenced
154n; as field of study, x, 142– apprenticeship novel. See
152; as genre, ix–xi, 3, 7–15, 16, Bildungsroman
19–20, 43, 54 –55, 57, 71, 84, 85– archetype, 14, 60
86, 102, 118, 124, 135, 140 –141, Ariès, Phillipe, 122
158n; history of, 7–10, 157n; as Arilla Sun Down. See Hamilton,
socializing institution, x, xii, 22, Virginia
32, 33, 54, 73, 82– 83, 85, 92, 116, assomption, 5, 154n
126, 140, 142–144. See also Young Atwood, Margaret, 130, 159n; Bodily
Adult literature Harm, 159n
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. See authority, 15, 16, 19, 21, 24, 34 –38,
Twain, Mark 52, 53, 60, 111–112, 122, 141; fig-
aesthetics, 10, 20, 31 ures, x, xi, xii, 55– 69, 96, 140;
A-father. See psychoanalytic theory paradox of, 54 – 83, 102; textual,
African American literature, 46 xii, 69– 83, 85, 116, 142
agency, 5, 97, 100 –101, 123–126, Avi, 10, 21, 27; Nothing but the Truth,
127, 128, 133, 135, 138, 140, 151, 10, 21–22, 27
154n, 159n. See also subjectivity
AIDS, 93, 94, 115, 131, 134, 149 Baby Be-Bop. See Block, Francesca Lia
Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars. See Bailey, M. E., 158n
Pinkwater, Daniel Bakhtin, Mikhail, 35, 40, 148 –149
Alcott, Louisa May, 8; Little Women, Bakhtinian Theory, xiii, 35, 36, 40,
xiii, 35, 57, 58, 119, 147, 156– 148 –149. See also carnivalesque;
157n dialogic; dialectic; grotesque; het-
Alger, Horatio, 8 eroglossia; voice, competing
178 : Index
Banta, Martha, 125 Brooks, Bruce, xiii, 146; The Moves

Barthes, Roland, 124 –125, 127, 135, Make the Man, 146
136, 139, 159–160n; Camera Lu- Brooks, Peter, 136–137, 160n
cida, 124 –125, 135 Brown, Jean E., 9, 154n
Bartky, Sandra Lee, 158n Bryant, William Jennings, 155n
Baum, L. Frank, 31, 155n; The Won- Buckley, Jerome, 11, 13
derful Wizard of Oz, 31, 155n Buddhism, 41, 46
Beattie, Ann, 159n; Picturing Will, Butler, Judith, 5, 7, 103, 156n
159n
Bedell, Madelon, 58 Cadden, Michael J., 148, 153n, 157n
The Beginning Place. See Le Guin, Ur- Cadogan, Mary, 156n
sula K. Camera Lucida. See Barthes, Roland
being-towards-death. See death Campbell, Joseph, 37
Belsey, Catharine, 127 canon, xiii, 32, 145, 150
Bennett, James, xiii, 70; I Can Hear Carlyle, Thomas, 155n
the Mourning Dove, 70, 157n carnivalesque, 23, 35, 36, 37, 53,
Bennett, Tony, 31 148 –149
Benson, Linda, 150, 155n Carroll, Lewis, Alice in Wonderland,
Bentham, Jeremy, 23–24. See also 2, 55
panopticon Carroll, Virginia Schaefer, 151
Bergman, David, 109 Cart, Michael, 154n
bibliotherapy, 96, 113 Carter, Betty, 154n
Bildungsroman, xi, 3, 9, 10 –15, 16, 18, Cartesian thinking, 44, 112
19, 20, 27, 31, 36, 43, 61, 65, 118, The Catcher in the Rye. See Salinger, J. D.
121, 134, 135, 140, 154n, 155n Catholicism, 87, 103
biological imperatives. See sex; death censorship, x, 92, 106
bisexuality. See sexuality Chambers, Aidan, xiii, 60, 72, 86, 96,
Block, Francesca Lia, xiii, 85, 86, 97, 102, 104, 105, 106, 107, 109,
93, 96, 102, 107, 109, 120, 124, 122, 138, 153n; Breaktime, xiii,
129, 140, 149; Baby Be-Bop, 86, 72–73, 96–97, 122–123, 138;
102, 107–109, 113, 114, 115; The Dance on My Grave, 86, 102, 104 –
Hanged Man, 85, 96; Weetzie Bat, 107, 109, 113, 114, 115
xiii, 35, 93–94, 107, 109, 129– The Changeover. See Mahy, Margaret
130, 149, 150; Witch Baby, 124, Charlotte’s Web. See White, E. B.
129–132, 133, 137–138 Chatman, Seymour, 72–73
Blume, Judy, xiii, 84, 86, 88, 90, 91, Chbosky, Stephen, 96; The Perks of
92, 93, 158n; Deenie, 158n; Forever, Being a Wallflower, 96
84, 86, 88 –93, 158n; Then Again, ‘‘childness,’’ 83. See also Hollindale,
Maybe I Won’t, 158n Peter
Bodily Harm. See Atwood, Margaret The Children of Green Knowe, 55
Borcherdt, Hans Heinrich, 11, 12 children’s literature, 2, 20, 118, 154n,
Bowen, Deborah, 139, 160n 158n
Breaktime. See Chambers, Aidan Chisnell, Steven R., 161n
Bridge to Terabithia. See Paterson, The Chocolate War. See Cormier,
Katherine Robert
Index : 179
The Chosen. See Potok, Chaim Daddy-Long-Legs. See Webster, Jean

Christianity, 43– 45, 46, 80, 111, Daly, Mary, 156n
122 Daly, Maureen, 58, 151; Seventeenth
Christy. See Marshall, Catherine Summer, 9, 57, 58 –59, 147, 151,
church. See Institutions 157n
Civil Rights movement, 29, 132, 133, Dance on My Grave. See Chambers,
138, 150 Aidan
Cixous, Hélène, 156n David and Della. See Zindel, Paul
Clark, Beverly Lyon, 32 David and Jonathan. See Voigt, Cynthia
class. See identity politics David Copperfield. See Dickens, Charles
Clausen, Christopher, 153n death, ix–x, xii, xiii, 3, 16, 20, 104 –
Clemens, Samuel. See Twain, Mark 105, 117–141, 142–144, 159n,
Cline, Ruth K. J., 154n 160n, 161n; being-towards-death,
Coats, Karen, 6, 118, 151, 154n, 119, 120, 121, 124, 132, 134, 140,
156n, 157n, 159n 141, 143; patterns, 117–121. See
Collier, James Lincoln, and Christo- also discourse; institutions, death
pher Collier, 31; My Brother Sam Is deconstruction, xiii, 64, 89, 145,
Dead, 31 148 –150
coming-of-age novel. See Deenie. See Blume, Judy
Bildungsroman Deliver Us from Evie. See Kerr, M. E.
Conford, Ellen, 68; To All My Fans, DeLuca, Geraldine, 8, 154n
with Love, from Sylvie, 68 Demeter, 157n
Confucian philosophy, 41 development. See growth
Connell, R. W., 153n dialectic of identity, 47–51
Conrad, William, 82 dialogic, 38, 40 – 41, 42, 43– 45, 81,
contextualized readings. See 148 –151, 152; of difference 47–
historicism 51. See also heteroglossia; polyph-
contract-oppression schema. See ony; voice
power Diary of a Young Girl. See Frank, Anne
Coolidge, Susan, 8 Dicey’s Song. See Voigt, Cynthia
Cooper, James Fenimore, 8 Dickens, Charles, 8; David Copperfield,
Cormier, Robert, xiii, 1, 5, 8, 10, 15, 12; Great Expectations, 160 –161n
24, 25, 26, 37–38, 79, 84, 139; The Dickinson, Peter, xiii
Chocolate War, x, xiii, 1–3, 4 –5, 6, didacticism, ix, 71, 73, 79, 85, 86, 92,
8, 10, 15, 16, 24, 37–38, 71, 72, 93, 97, 102, 158n
84, 139, 151, 154n; I Am the Dilthey, Wilhelm, 11, 12, 154n
Cheese, 25–27, 31, 71, 120 discourse, xii, 16, 17, 21–23, 26–27,
Craig, Patricia, 156n 30 –31, 37, 38, 44 – 45, 46, 52, 54,
Cross, Gillian, 138; Pictures in the 76, 77, 78 –79, 80, 86– 88, 115–
Dark, 138 116, 119, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142–
The Crucible, 112 144, 151; of conflict 48 –52; of
Crutcher, Chris, xiii, 55, 59, 70, 74, consensus, 48 –52; and death,
79, 80, 82– 83, 94; Ironman, 74, 79; 122–126; defined, 155n; queer
Running Loose, 59, 94 –95; Staying discourse, 102–116. See also
Fat for Sarah Byrnes, 55, 70, 80 – 82 language
180 : Index
disturbing the universe, xiv, 1–3, 6, feminism, xiii, 6, 12–13, 29, 45–52,
38, 139, 141, 152 97–102, 109–113, 147–151, 157–
diversity, 9, 30. See also 158n
multiculturalism Fetterley, Judith, 158n
Dixon, Bob, 157n Fiedler, Leslie, 60
Dollimore, Jonathan, 103 filial piety, 41– 43
domination-repression model. See Fink, Bruce, 5– 6
power Finley, Martha, 8
Donelson, Kenneth, 154n Fish, Stanley, 145
Donovan, John, 104; I’ll Get There. It focalizer, 149, 150; defined, 161n. See
Better Be Worth the Trip, 104 also Stephens, John
Dragonwagon, Crescent, 134, 157n; foil, 39, 50, 66, 101
The Year It Rained, 134, 157n Forbes, Esther, 31; Johnny Tremain, 31
Dragonwings. See Yep, Laurence Ford, Elizabeth A., 109
Dream Boy. See Grimsley, Jim Forever. See Blume, Judy
Duncan, Lois, xiii Foster, Shirley, 147, 156n
Duras, Marguerite, 160n Foucault, Michel, x, 4 –5, 7, 16, 22,
23–24, 52, 79, 86– 87, 95, 100,
Eagleton, Terry, 52 102–103, 106, 109, 112, 113, 114,
Edith Jackson. See Guy, Rosa 115, 117, 153n, 155n, 158n; The
Eliot, T. S., 1–2; ‘‘The Love Song of History of Sexuality, 86– 88
J. Alfred Prufrock,’’ 1–2, 38, 84, Francis, Christine Doyle, 153n
139 Frank, Anne, 121, 147; Diary of a
Ellison, Ralph, 46 Young Girl, 121, 147
empowerment. See power French, Marilyn, 6, 159n; Her
Enchantress from the Stars. See Engdahl, Mother’s Daughter, 159n
Sylvia Freud, Sigmund, 35, 41, 135, 156n,
Engdahl, Sylvia, 28, 151; Enchantress 160n
from the Stars, 28, 151 Freudian theory, 36, 56, 74, 87, 91,
English Journal, 157n 97, 135, 156n, 160n
Entwicklungsroman, 3, 9, 10 –15, 16, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E.
18, 19, 20, 32, 43, 52, 68, 92, 117, Frankweiler. See Konigsburg, E. L.
140, 141, 144, 154n. See also novel From the Notebooks of Melanin Sun. See
of female development Woodson, Jacqueline
epiphany, 3, 13, 68, 74 Frye, Marilyn, 156n
Episcopalianism, 32, 142 Fuoss, Kirk, 105, 113
essentialism, 47; defined 156n Furst, Lilian R., ix
Estes, Angela M., 147, 156n
Garden, Nancy, xiii, 86, 112, 113;
family. See institutions Good Moon Rising, 86, 112–115
fantasy, 24; defined 42, 98 Gates, Henry Louis, 46
‘‘The Farmer in the Dell,’’ 26 The Gathering. See Hamilton, Virginia
father. See parents gaze, 134, 136
Fellman, Anita Clair, 25 gender. See identity politics
Index : 181
Genette, Gérard, 70 –72, 150 Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azka-
Gilligan, Carol, 151 ban. See Rowling, J. K.
Giroux, Henry, 161n Hatfield, Len, 148
The Giver. See Lowry, Lois Heidegger, Martin, 159n
Go Ask Alice. See Sparks, Beatrice Henderson, Mae Gwendolyn, 47
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 11; Her Mother’s Daughter. See Atwood,
Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 11, Margaret
155n Hesse, Karen, 120; Out of the Dust,
Golding, William, Lord of the Flies, 24 120
Good Moon Rising. See Garden, Nancy heteroglossia, 40, 53, 148 –149. See
government. See institutions also dialogics; polyphony; voice
Gray, John, 47; Men Are from Mars, heterosexism, 109, 111
Women Are from Venus, 47 heterosexuality. See sexuality
Great Depression, 147 Hinton, S. E., xiii, 14, 60, 69, 71, 79;
Great Expectations. See Dickens, That Was Then, This Is Now, 71;
Charles The Outsiders, x, xiii, 9, 14 –15, 57,
The Great Gilly Hopkins. See Paterson, 60, 69, 71, 73, 79, 117, 120, 154n
Katherine Hirsch, Marianne, 12–13, 125, 159–
Grenz, Dagmar, 154n 160n
Grey, Zane, 8 historicism, xiii, 31, 145, 147–148
Grimsley, Jim, 96; Dream Boy, 96 The History of Sexuality. See Foucault,
grotesque, 149. See also Bakhtinian Michel
theory Ho, Minfong, 150
growth, ix–x, 9–20, 22, 33, 36–37, Hollindale, Peter, 70, 80, 83, 146,
43, 52, 55–56, 58, 60 – 61, 64 – 65, 150, 152, 157–158n
67– 68, 73–74, 79– 80, 83, 119, Holocaust, 39, 40, 108, 109, 121,
121, 123, 131, 133, 136, 140, 143, 147
158n, 159n home. See institutions
Guy, Rosa, 92; Edith Jackson, 90, 92, The Homecoming. See Voigt, Cynthia
158n homoeroticism. See sexuality
homophobia. See sexuality
Hades, 157n homosexuality. See sexuality
Hall, G. Stanley, 8, 9; Adolescence, 8 A House Like a Lotus. See L’Engle,
Hamilton, Virginia, xiii, 25, 27, 29, Madeleine
30, 46, 54, 55, 57, 59, 65, 69, 75, House of Stairs. See Sleator, William
79, 84, 150; Arilla Sun Down, 55, Howe, Susanne, 11
69–70, 75–79; The Gathering, 25, humanism, 158n
27–31, 46– 47; M. C. Higgins, the humor, 35
Great, 10, 57, 59; Planet of Junior The Hundred Secret Senses. See Tan, Amy
Brown, 54, 57, 65– 69; A White Ro- Hunt, Caroline, x, 82, 144 –145, 150,
mance, 84 – 85; Zeely, 2 154n
The Hanged Man. See Block, Francesca Hunt, Peter, 146
Lia Hunter, Mollie, 121, 149; A Sound of
Harriet the Spy, 10, 118 Chariots, 121, 149
182 : Index
I Am the Cheese. See Cormier, Robert xii, 3, 16, 18, 19, 20, 22–23, 24,
I Can Hear the Mourning Dove. See 31, 32, 47, 52, 144; religion, x, xi,
Bennett, James xii, 17, 20, 22, 23, 29, 32, 38 – 45,
Ideal-I. See psychoanalytic theory 53, 142–144; and repression, 33–
identity, ix, 49, 76, 113, 122, 130, 131, 38, 41, 52; school, ix, x, xi, 2, 3, 5,
139, 153n, 157–158n. See also 8, 11, 15, 20, 21, 22–23, 24, 31–
identity politics; subjectivity 38, 43, 53, 66– 67, 74, 76, 89, 123,
identity politics, x, xi, xii, 22–23, 38, 142–144, 145, 149, 152, 155n. See
45–52, 53, 76–77; adolescence, also individual religions
xi, 8 –9, 80 – 83; class, xi, 3, 23, intertextuality, 2
38, 46, 47, 50 –52, 59, 133; de- Ironman. See Crutcher, Chris
fined, 45– 47; gender, xi, 3, 20, irony, 21, 26, 34, 44, 64, 113, 157n
23, 25, 29, 38, 43, 46, 47–52, 73, Irwin, Hadley, 85, 96, 149; Abby, My
76, 77, 78, 95, 97–102, 147–148, Love, 85, 96
151, 156n, 157n; race, xi, 3, 23, Is That You, Miss Blue. See Kerr, M. E.
28 –29, 38, 45–52, 73, 75–76, 78, Iser, Wolfgang, 145, 146–147
151, 158n; religion, x, xi, xii, 38 – Island of the Blue Dolphins. See O’Dell,
45; sexual orientation, 3, 84, 107, Scott
111, 113. See also institutions; rac- It Happened to Nancy. See Sparks,
ism; sexism; sexuality Beatrice
Ideological State Apparatuses, 4, 20, It’s OK if You Don’t Love Me. See Klein,
22, 83. See also institutions Norma
ideology, x, xi, xii, 4, 10, 23, 24 –25,
28, 31, 41, 45, 52, 69– 83, 85, 86– Jameson, Fredric, 18, 31, 51, 52,
96, 102, 109, 110, 111, 116, 126, 155n
142, 149–151, 153n, 155n, 157n Janeway, Elizabeth, 156n
I’ll Get There. It Better Be Worth the Jenkins, Christine, 104
Trip. See Donovan, John Johnny, My Friend. See Pohl, Peter
Imaginary. See psychoanalytic theory Johnny Tremain. See Forbes, Esther
impossibility of children’s literature, Johnson, Angela, 74, 138, 150; Toning
83. See also Rose, Jacqueline the Sweep, x, xiii, 74, 79, 117–118,
industrialization, 8, 17 120, 138, 150, 151
in loco parentis. See psychoanalytic Johnson, Barbara, 46
theory jouissance. See sexuality
in logos parentis. See psychoanalytic Joyce, James, A Portrait of the Artist as
theory a Young Man, 12
in parentis. See psychoanalytic theory Judaism, 39– 41, 46
institutions, 3, 7, 8, 16, 18, 19, 20 –
53, 54, 86, 103, 117, 141, 142, Keats, Ezra Jack, The Snowy Day, 10
144; church, 3, 142; death (insti- Kerr, M. E., xiii, 32, 34, 38, 43, 45,
tutions surrounding), 117–123, 86, 109, 110, 111, 142, 149; Deliver
140; family, x, 3, 15, 20, 21, 22, Us from Evie, 86, 109–112, 113,
142–144; government, x, xi, xii, 114; Is That You, Miss Blue?, xiii,
3, 16, 21, 22, 23–31, 53; home, 3, 32–33, 34, 38, 142–144; What I
10, 11, 153n; and the individual, Really Think of You, 38, 43– 45
Index : 183
Kett, Joseph, 8 148; A Wizard of Earthsea, xiii,

Keyser, Elizabeth, 58 60 – 61, 121
Kidd, Kenneth, 151 L’Engle, Madeleine, xiii, 28, 79, 86,
Kincaid, Jamaica, 159n; Annie John, 96, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 151,
157n; Lucy, 159n 158n; A House Like a Lotus, 86,
Kipling, Rudyard, 8 96, 98 –102, 158n; A Swiftly Tilting
Klein, Norma, xiii, 84, 97; It’s OK if Planet, 28; A Wrinkle in Time, 151
You Don’t Love Me, 84, 97 lesbianism. See sexuality
Knoeller, Christian Peter, 149 libertarianism, 25
Knowles, John, 6, 134; A Separate Linn, Ray, 145
Peace, xiii, 6, 36–37, 134 literacy narrative, 13, 150, 155n
Konigsburg, E. L., From the Mixed- The Little Town on the Prairie. See Wil-
up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frank- der, Laura Ingalls
weiler, 55 Little Women. See Alcott, Louisa May
Kraus, W. Keith, 92 Littlefield, Henry M., 155n
Krisher, Trudy, 120, 124, 132, 140; The Long Winter. See Wilder, Laura
Spite Fences, 124, 132–134, 137– Ingalls
138 Lord of the Flies. See Golding, William
Kristeva, Julia, 160n Love Is the Crooked Thing. See Wersba,
Kübler-Ross, Elisabeth, 118 Barbara
Kubrick, Stanley, 28; 2001: A Space ‘‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Pruf-
Odyssey, 28 rock.’’ See Eliot, T. S.
Lowry, Lois, 119–120, 121, 124, 128,
Lacan, Jacques, 5, 56–57, 61, 65, 67, 140; The Giver, 121; Number the
69, 127–128, 154n, 155n, 156n, Stars, 121; A Summer to Die, 124,
157n, 160n 126–129, 130, 131, 133, 137–138
Langland, Elizabeth, 12–13 Lucy. See Kincaid, Jamaica
language, xi, 5, 18, 21–23, 26–27, 37, Lukkens, Rebecca J., 154n
38, 69, 85– 86, 100, 113–116, Lyddie. See Paterson, Katherine
123–126, 127, 132–134, 152,
159–160n; defined, 155n; langue, MacLachlan, Patricia, Sarah Plain and
160n; parole, 160n. See also Tall, 2
discourse; subjectivity MacLeod, Anne Scott, 15, 24
langue. See language Mahy, Margaret, xiii, 121, 138, 145;
Lanser, Susan S., 157n The Changeover, 121, 138
Lant, Kathleen M., 147, 156n Makaryk, Irena R., 156n
Larsen, Nella, 47; Passing, 47 Marshall, Catherine, 13; Christy, 13
Lawrence, D. H., Sons and Lovers, Martin, Michelle H., 148 –149
12 Marxism, xiii, 149–150. See also Ideo-
Lawrence-Pietroni, Anna, 145 logical State Apparatuses;
Lee, Harper, 27; To Kill a Mocking- ideology
bird, 27 May, Jill P., 10, 146, 147
Lee, Vanessa Wayne, 110, 152 McGillis, Roderick, 56–57, 146, 151
Le Guin, Ursula K., xiii, 60, 98, 121; M. C. Higgins, the Great. See Hamilton,
The Beginning Place, 98; Tehanu, Virginia
184 : Index
McKinley, Robin, xiii narrative theory, xiii, 70 – 83, 145–

McKinley, William, 155n 147, 148 –150, 160 –161n; narra-
McNay, Lois, 158n tee, 72–73, 79; narrative position,
méconnaisance. See psychoanalytic 70 – 83; narrative resolution, 21,
theory 85, 137–141, 143–144; narrative
Meigs, Cornelia, 8 structure, xi, 55, 70 – 83, 120,
Men Are from Mars, Women Are from 123–141, 153n; narrator, ix, 43,
Venus. See Gray, John 71–73, 80, 83, 123, 146, 151,
Merriwell, Frank, 8 157n; extradiegetic narrator, 71–
metafiction, 107, 151 75, 76, 81; intradiegetic narrator,
The Mill on the Floss, 12 71–75, 77, 81. See also authority,
mirror stage. See psychoanalytic textual; reader
theory National Council of Teachers of En-
misogyny, 69 glish (NCTE), 9
Mo, Weimen, 42 Natov, Roni, 8, 157n
Moby-Dick, 145 Nazism, 30
modernism and modernity, 16–17, Nelms, Ben F., 154n, 157n
18, 19 New Criticism, 145
monologic, 148, 151 Nikolajeva, Maria, 7, 10, 72–73, 146,
Monro, David, 156n 148, 154n, 156n
Montgomery, L. M., 8; Anne of Green Nilsen, Alleen Pace, 154n
Gables, 10 Nodelman, Perry, 3, 24, 55–56, 146,
Moore, Rebecca Cabell, 156n 153n
Morin, Edgar, 135 Nothing but the Truth. See Avi
mother. See parents novel of development. See
The Moves Make the Man. See Brooks, Entwicklungsroman
Bruce novel of female development, 12–
multiculturalism, xiii, 145, 150 –152. 15, 58
See also diversity Number the Stars. See Lowry, Lois
Murphy, Ann B., 156n
Muslim, 46 objectification, 91, 95, 96, 101, 159–
My Brother Sam Is Dead. See Collier, 160n
James Lincoln and Christopher objectivity, 101, 119, 123–129, 134 –
Collier 136, 139–140, 143; defined 154n
My Darling, My Hamburger. See Zindel, O’Dell, Scott, 146–147; Island of the
Paul Blue Dolphins, 146–147
Myers, Mitzi, 147, 156n Oedipal Crisis. See psychoanalytic
Myers, Walter Dean, xiii, 14, 150; theory
Scorpions, 14 –15, 120 On Fortune’s Wheel. See Voigt, Cynthia
Original Stories from Real Life. See Woll-
Name-of-the-Father. See psychoana- stonecraft, Mary
lytic theory; parents, symbolic Other. See psychoanalytic theory
father Out of the Dust. See Hesse, Karen
Nancy Drew, 10 The Outsiders. See Hinton, S. E.
Index : 185
pain. See power A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

panopticon, 23–24, 26 See Joyce, James
paraliterature, 10 postmodernism, 3, 16, 17–18, 19, 20,
parents, ix, xii, 54 – 69, 83, 96, 118, 21, 52, 110, 115, 129, 144, 155n
122, 157n; fathers, 11, 43, 59– 61; poststructuralism, x, xiii, 16, 41, 139,
mothers, 57, 58, 65, 68 – 69, 104, 144 –152; defined 155n, 158n
157n; symbolic father, 63, 157n. Potok, Chaim, 38; The Chosen 38 – 41,
See also psychoanalytic theory 43, 56
parole. See language power, x, xi, xiii, 1–3, 4, 6, 25, 31, 46,
Passing. See Larsen, Nella 81– 82, 132, 142–144, 157n, 159n;
Paterson, Katherine, 13, 68, 150; abuse of, 24, 28, 30, 63, 85, 96,
Bridge to Terabithia, 117; The Great 99, 102, 133, 138; contract-op-
Gilly Hopkins, 68; Lyddie, xiii, 13– pression schema, 4; defined 3–7,
14, 16, 18, 120 –121, 150 153n; domination-repression
patriarchy, 39– 41, 43, 44 – 45, 56, 58, model, 4, 5, 7– 8, 22, 30, 38, 52;
88, 95, 97, 109, 158n empowerment, xii, 5, 14, 16, 20,
Paul, Lissa, 14, 146, 151; Reading Oth- 22, 25–27, 30, 33–38, 48 –52, 54,
erways, 151 60 – 61, 65, 68, 69, 70 –71, 77, 79–
Peck, Richard, xiii, 149, 154n 80, 84, 96–102, 119, 121, 126,
pedagogy, x, xiii, 144 –152 136, 141, 151; and growth, 3, 10 –
The Perks of Being a Wallflower. See 15, 16, 18 –20; and knowledge,
Chbosky, Stephen 26–27, 51, 52, 63, 66, 67, 70, 71–
Persephone, 157n 72, 74, 77–79, 87– 88, 96–102,
Peter Rabbit, 2, 10, 11, 20 119–121, 122, 129, 140 –141; and
phenomenology, 146 narrative position, 70 – 83; and
photography, ix, 120, 123–141, 159– pain, 6, 103–104, 106–107, 110,
160n 113, 149; and pleasure, 6, 86– 88,
Pictures in the Dark. See Cross, Gillian 96–104, 106–107, 110, 112, 113,
Picturing Will. See Beattie, Ann 115–116, 129, 149; and repres-
The Pigman. See Zindel, Paul sion, xii, 5, 14, 16, 19, 20, 22, 25–
Pinkwater, Daniel, xiii, 33–34; Alan 27, 32, 33–38, 41, 48 –52, 54, 56,
Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars, 33– 58, 68, 71, 76, 79, 84 –116, 119,
34 126, 136, 138, 141, 142–144; and
Pirie, Bruce, 145 sexuality, 84 –116. See also
The Planet of Junior Brown. See Hamil- institutions
ton, Virginia Pratt, Annis, 12–13, 14
pleasure. See power pre-Oedipal. See psychoanalytic
Poe, Elizabeth Ann, 154n theory
Pohl, Peter, 47; Johnny, My Friend, 47 problem novel, 14, 71
politics. See institutions; government; publishing industry, 7, 9, 92, 105–
identity politics 106, 157n
polyphony, 148 –149, 152, 156n. See psychoanalytic theory, xii, xiii, 9, 36,
dialogics; heteroglossia; voices, 55– 69, 74, 84 –116, 135, 151–
competing 152, 123–126, 127, 135, 136–137,
186 : Index
psychoanalytic theory (continued ) religion. See institutions; identity

145, 151, 156n, 160 –161n; A-fa- politics
ther, 61; Ideal-I, 57; the Imagi- repression. See power
nary, 56–57, 65, 115, 157n; in loco (re)visionary readings, 150 –152. See
parentis, 57, 58, 60 – 61, 64, 67, 68, also multiculturalism
74, 77, 81, 118; in logos parentis, Richards, Jeffrey, 156n
57–58, 61– 69, 80, 143; in parentis, The Road to Memphis. See Taylor,
58 – 60; méconnaisance, 56; mirror Mildred
stage, 56–57; Name-of-the-Fa- Robinson, Mabel, 8
ther, 57, 61, 78, 131; Oedipal Cri- Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry. See Tay-
sis or Struggle, ix, 11, 32, 43, 56– lor, Mildred
57, 59, 60, 62, 65, 68, 74, 91, 97; romance in novels, 84 – 85
Other, xi, 5– 6, 12, 47–52, 56–57, romanticism, 3, 8, 11, 14, 15, 16–17,
102, 115–116, 154n; pre-Oedipal, 18, 19–20, 122, 154n, 155n
65; symbolic order, 56–57, 63, Rose, Jacqueline, 83
64, 68, 69, 76, 77, 83, 115, 143, Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 23
155n, 157n. See also Freudian Rowling, J. K., 138 –139; Harry Potter
theory; Lacan; parents and the Prisoner of Azkaban, 138 –
139
queer discourse. See discourse Runaway Bunny, 118
queer theory, 158n Running Loose. See Crutcher, Chris
queer Young Adult novels, 102–115, Russell, David, 35
158n
Quigly, Isabel, 155n Salinger, J. D., 34, 69; The Catcher in
the Rye, xiii, 9, 34, 69, 72, 73–75,
race. See identity politics 79, 117, 119, 121, 154n
racism, 28 –29, 45–52, 59, 132, 146, Samuels, Barbara G., 154n
157–158n Sarah, Plain and Tall. See MacLachlan,
Ramazanoglu, Caroline, 158n Patricia
Ramona (Beverly Cleary character), Saussure, Ferdinand de, 125, 156n
10, 20 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 11
Ranta, Taimi M., ix school. See institutions
reader, actual, 70, 72–73, 140, 147, school stories, defined, 32
150; adolescent, xiii, 70 – 83, 147, Schwartz, Sheila, 7
150, 152; adult, 74, 81– 82; im- Schweickart, Patrocinio, 145, 157n
plied, 55, 70, 72–73, 81– 82, 146, science fiction, 12, 25
151, 157–158n Scorpions. See Myers, Walter Dean
reader response theory, xi, xiii, 145– The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged
147 13. See Townsend, Sue
Reading Otherways. See Paul, Lissa A Separate Peace. See Knowles, John
Reagan era, 29 Self, xi, 3, 17, 20, 47–52, 115
realism, defined, 42 Seventeenth Summer. See Daly, Maureen
rebellion, xi, 6, 25, 30, 33–38, 43– sex, x, xii, 117; defined 86– 88
47, 50, 54, 57– 69, 74, 78 – 80, sexism, 47, 49–51, 146, 151, 157–
142–143, 157n 158n, 160n
Index : 187
sexuality, ix, xii, 3, 11, 13, 16, 19, 32, Spite Fences. See Krisher, Trudy
63, 64, 74, 84 –116, 117, 122–123, Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes. See
138, 140, 142–144, 157n; bisexu- Crutcher, Chris
ality, 113; defined, 86– 88; and Stephens, Elaine C., 9, 154n
discourse, 37, 85– 86, 100, 102– Stephens, John, 35, 129, 146, 148,
116; heterosexuality, xii, 86–102, 150, 161n
109, 110, 111, 112, 115; homo- stereotype, 47, 104, 110 –111, 112,
eroticism, 37, 60; homophobia, 146
37–38, 69, 99, 100, 103, 107, 109; Stevenson, Robert Louis, 8
homosexuality, xii, 38, 86, 102– Stott, Jon, 153n
109, 110, 113–116; jouissance, 86, Stratemeyer Syndicate, 8
92, 95, 96–102, 112, 115, 158n; subjectivity, xi, xii, 5– 6, 7, 16, 18, 20,
lesbianism, xii, 99, 102, 104, 108, 55, 69, 73, 78, 100 –101, 119,
109–116, 152; and power, 50, 123–129, 130, 133–136, 139–140,
63, 84 –116; as rite of passage, 143; defined 154n, 156n, 159–
84, 97, 102, 115; sexual abuse, 160n. See also agency
85, 96, 99, 102, 133. See also iden- A Summer to Die. See Lowry, Lois
tity politics Susina, Jan, 24
sexual abuse. See sexuality Sutherland, Robert D., 157n
Shen, Wenju, 42 A Swiftly Tilting Planet. See L’Engle,
signification, 125, 131, 156n, 159– Madeleine
160n Symbolic Order. See psychoanalytic
silence. See voice, silenced theory
Simons, Judy, 147, 156n
Slaughterhouse-Five. See Vonnegut, Kurt Tan, Amy, 159n; The Hundred Secret
Sleator, William, xiii, 25; House of Senses, 159n
Stairs, 25 Tarr, Anita, 15, 146–147
Smith, Betty, 121; A Tree Grows in Taylor, Mildred, xiii, 12, 48, 51, 156n;
Brooklyn, 121 The Road to Memphis, 48 –52; Roll
The Snowy Day. See Keats, Ezra Jack of Thunder, Hear My Cry, 10
social class. See identity politics, class Tehanu. See Le Guin, Ursula K.
social constructs, xii, 16, 19, 20, Tennyson, G. B., 11, 12, 154n, 155n
23, 45– 46, 54, 69, 83, 113, 140, That Was Then, This Is Now. See Hin-
144, 154n. See also identity ton, S. E.
politics Then Again, Maybe I Won’t. See Blume,
Sons and Lovers. See Lawrence, D. H. Judy
Sontag, Susan, 125–126, 128, 129, To All My Fans, with Love, from Sylvie.
160n See Conford, Ellen
Soper, Kate, 158n To Kill a Mockingbird. See Lee, Harper
Soto, Gary, 150 Tolson, Nancy, 150
A Sound of Chariots. See Hunter, Toning the Sweep. See Johnson, Angela
Mollie Townsend, Sue, 34; The Secret Diary of
Sparks, Beatrice, xiii, 92, 93, 94, 151; Adrian Mole, Aged 13, 34
Go Ask Alice, 92, 94; It Happened transactional critics, x, 146–147, 152.
to Nancy, 93–94, 151 See also individual critics
188 : Index
transcendence, 14, 17, 18, 34, 38, 45, West, Cornel, 46

132, 136, 137, 159n West, Mark I., 156n
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. See Smith, What I Really Think of You. See Kerr,
Betty M. E.
Trites, Roberta Seelinger, 151, 154n, When She Hollers. See Voigt, Cynthia
156n, 157n Where the Wild Things Are, 2, 10, 20
Tuck Everlasting, 118 White, Barbara, 14
Twain, Mark, 8; Adventures of Huckle- White, E. B., Charlotte’s Web, 2, 118,
berry Finn, x, xiii, 57, 60, 71, 72 120, 121
2001: A Space Odyssey. See Kubrick, A White Romance. See Hamilton,
Stanley Virginia
Wiegman, Robyn, 47
United States, constitution 22; gov- Wiggin, Kate Douglas, 8
ernment, 22, 26–27 Wilder, Laura Ingalls, 25, 34; The
Little Town on the Prairie, 34; The
Vallone, Lynne, 147 Long Winter, 25, 31
Van Riper, Dorothy, ix Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. See
Victorianism, 36, 154n, 155n Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von
Vietnam War, 24, 25, 31, 81 Wilson, Sharon R., 130, 159n
voice, 23, 39– 41, 49–52, 70 – 83, Winnett, Susan, 160n
96, 119, 133, 151; adolescent, Winnie-the-Pooh, 2, 10
70 – 83; adult, 70 – 83; compet- Witch Baby. See Block, Francesca Lia
ing, 23, 40, 42, 43, 148 –150, A Wizard of Earthsea. See Le Guin,
150 –151; patriarchal, 158n; si- Ursula K.
lenced 23, 39– 41, 49–52, 65. Wollstonecraft, Mary, 147; Original
See also dialogic; polyphony; Stories from Real Life, 147
heteroglossia women’s literature, 159n
Voigt, Cynthia, xiii, 12, 61, 79, 85, 96, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. See Baum,
98, 121; David and Jonathan, 121; L. Frank
Dicey’s Song, 61; The Homecoming, Wood, Naomi, 41
61; On Fortune’s Wheel, 98; When Woodson, Jacqueline, xiii, 59; From
She Hollers, 85, 96 the Notebooks of Melanin Sun, 59,
Vonnegut, Kurt, 105; Slaughterhouse- 157n
Five, 105 World War II, 9, 31
Wright, Orville and Wilbur, 42
Waddey, Lucy, 153n A Wrinkle in Time. See L’Engle,
Warner, Susan, 8 Madeleine
Watergate, 26
Weber, Max, 3– 4 The Year It Rained. See Dragonwagon,
Webster, Jean, 54; Daddy-Long-Legs, Crescent
54, 61– 65 Yep, Laurence, xiii, 11, 38, 41, 47, 59,
Weeks, Jeffrey, 158n 150; Dragonwings, 11, 38, 41– 43,
Weetzie Bat. See Block, Francesca Lia 47, 59
Wersba, Barbara, xiii, 157n; Love Is Yonge, Charlotte, 8
the Crooked Thing, 157n Yoshida, Junko, 24
Index : 189
Young Adult literature 3, 14; defined, Zeely. See Hamilton, Virginia

xi, xii, 7–10, 19; as genre, xi, xiii, Zindel, Paul, xiii, 34, 85, 92; David
7–10, 18 –20, 52–53, 80, 82– 83, and Della, 85; My Darling, My
85– 86, 88, 92, 95, 97, 102, 123, Hamburger, 90, 92, 158n; The Pig-
142–144, 151, 154n, 156n; history man, x, 34 –35, 117, 154n
of, 7–10, 16, 19. See also adoles-
cent literature

Disturbing The Universepowerandrepressioninliterature

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Disturbing The Universepowerandrepressioninliterature

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Disturbing The Universepowerandrepressioninliterature

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

D is t ur bi ng

The publication of this book was generously supported by

Printed on acid-free paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

remember complaining to a friend in 1975 that I was tired

I of reading the books in our middle school library because

cluded Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Outsiders, The Chocolate

Theories that invite us to be sensitive to language and how it

intricate example of how power is deployed in ya novels because

unrepresented or underrepresented in this text because of space

I am blessed in the number of people who have supported the

Molly Burdette, Ronn Byrd, Julie Fraser, Heidi Green, Joellen

‘‘Do I dare disturb the universe?’’

And indeed there will be time

. S. Eliot was in his early twenties and undoubtedly

T still feeling the diverse effects of adolescence when he

explores the question of whether Jerry can disturb the universe

conﬁnes of her or his immediate environment, usually represented

Before I go any further, I want to explore the concept of

deﬁnes power as ‘‘the possibility of imposing one’s will upon the

pending on his relationship to the market forces at speciﬁc points

The various deﬁnitions of power I have described work to-

Deﬁning and Historicizing the Genre

In trying to deﬁne adolescent literature, Sheila Schwartz notes

‘‘ya’’ on these books. Even when authors have not intentionally

reason that books marketed speciﬁcally to this demographic arose

‘‘apprenticeship novels.’’ 11 Understanding the history of literature

The Bildungsroman and the Entwicklungsroman

Because ya novels evolved historically from the Bildungsroman,

G. B. Tennyson traces the coinage of the term Bildungsroman to

protagonist’s entry into adulthood.13 Buckley identiﬁes David Cop-

and the novel of awakening, which is by deﬁnition a novel of an

never emotionally autonomous — and her greatest lesson stems

if they have not achieved adulthood. In these novels, the protago-

Romanticism, Modernism, Postmodernism

When we identify a book as an Entwicklungsroman because the

John McGowan considers romanticism, modernism, and post-

in the modes of production that enact society, then nothing es-

ity of the traditional Bildungsroman with its emphasis on self-

‘‘I don’t know the words’’

A know the words’’ (177). Nothing but the Truth is a post-

broadcast of the national anthem. Foucault would note how Philip

ways that teenagers are affected by government policies or are

According to Foucault, political institutions work because

protagonist becomes ‘‘Adam’’ because he is the ﬁrst Farmer.

language. The dynamic between Adam’s memory and his ability

planet is populated with a number of mutants, implying that the

Singing together can be empowering, but not if the group is lim-

of his stutter. When he accepts the limitations institutions place

The concept of school as a social institution is omnipresent in

tagonist’s education, and many Entwicklungsromane are set in school

several years, as would be traditional in a School Story. But as an

acceptable to them. After all, as Leonard puts it, ‘‘There’s a gentle

details how to detonate ﬁrecrackers in the bathroom at schools

of their teachers. Only once they rebel against authoritarian rep-

as an adult narrates his Bildungsroman, so we know he has grown

continuing until they graduate from college. Reuven and Danny

will spend hours debating the meaning of one scriptural passage

their differences with Windrider. In the end, although Moon-