Adaptation in Young Adult Novels

Critically Engaging Past and Present

Dana E. Lawrence, Amy L. Montz, Dana E. Lawrence, Amy L. Montz

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501361784
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria

Adaptation in Young Adult Novels argues that adapting classic and canonical literature and historical places engages young adult readers with their cultural past and encourages them to see how that past can be rewritten. The textual afterlives of classic texts raise questions for new readers: What can be changed? What benefits from change? How can you, too, be agents of change? The contributors to this volume draw on a wide range of contemporary novels – from Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson series and Megan Shepherd's Madman's Daughter trilogy to Jesmyn Ward's Salvage the Bones – adapted from mythology, fairy tales, historical places, and the literary classics of Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, among others. Unpacking the new perspectives and critiques of gender, sexuality, and the cultural values of adolescents inherent to each adaptation, the essays in this volume make the case that literary adaptations are just as valuable as original works and demonstrate how the texts studied empower young readers to become more culturally, historically, and socially aware through the lens of literary diversity.

Part One

Representation Matters

1

Re-visioning Rosaline; or, Romeo and Juliet Are Dead

Fiona Hartley-Kroeger

Something Is Rotten with Romeo and Juliet!

“Romeo and Juliet are just two rich kids who’ve always gotten every little thing they want. And now, they think they want each other …. It’s Shakespeare making fun of love.”¹ When asked to articulate her unimpressed reaction to Romeo and Juliet, Eleanor, one half of the eponymous duo in Eleanor & Park, voices a persistent stance within millennial receptions of Romeo and Juliet: that Romeo and Juliet’s doomed romance engenders cynicism rather than sublime catharsis, nostalgia, or affection for the play. There is something wrong with the play, or more precisely with its reputation as the ultimate love story, that frustrates its audience and instills a powerful need for creative correction. Romeo and Juliet themselves prove impossible vehicles for this correction: they are dead, crushed by clichéd sentimentality, and cannot be the vehicles of Romeo and Juliet’s resurrection. Since the turn of the millennium, however, a micro-trend of Romeo and Juliet-inspired young adult novels have been published that feature not the eponymous star-crossed lovers but Rosaline, Romeo’s initial object of poetic adoration, and Romeo’s cousin, Benvolio. In Still Star-Crossed by Melinda Taub and Prince of Shadows by Rachel Caine, as well as Stacey Jay’s duology of Juliet Immortal and Romeo Redeemed, Rosaline and Benvolio serve as doubles for the doomed Romeo and Juliet in efforts to resolve frustrations with the play and its ubiquitous but unsatisfactory reputation as the greatest love story ever told. These transformations engage directly with events of Shakespeare’s play, with special focus on Rosaline as a replacement romantic heroine for the dead, idealized Juliet, drawing on Rosaline as the distant, chaste, silent beloved of the Petrarchan sonnet tradition in order to illuminate a need for women to survive and tell their own stories.

A number of scholars have positioned the act of retelling and adapting Shakespeare as an enterprise particularly congenial to feminist “re-vision,” a term coined by Adrienne Rich to describe “the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction.”² For Rich, re-vision is “an act of survival,” of understanding how women “have been led to imagine ourselves, how our language has trapped as well as liberated us; and how we can begin to see—and therefore live—afresh.”³ Re-vision enables women writers to reimagine possibilities for fictional women—possibilities beyond the fears of losing their youth and beauty, or of dying young and thus remaining beautiful eternally—and thereby to imagine possibilities for themselves and other women who read their work. As Marianne Novy observes, “Using fiction as a form of criticism, they [women rewriting Shakespeare] let characters escape plots that doom them to an oppressive marriage or to death …, and they imagine stories for figures who are silent or demonized in Shakespeare’s version.”⁴ Shakespeare’s uber-canonical body of work is a high-profile locus for re-vision, and Julie Sanders argues that working in prose narrative is a way for women rewriters of Shakespeare to set themselves apart from “their male-authored dramatic precursors” and “assert the innovative and creative aspect of their work.”⁵ Juliet is one of those “image[s]; of Woman” who die young and beautiful that Rich’s woman writer finds “in books written by men”; but in the beautiful, idealized, dead girl, “precisely what she does not find is that absorbed, drudging, puzzled, sometimes inspired creature, herself.”⁶ Re-visioning Romeo and Juliet in prose narrative, then, is a powerful and productive act of feminist imagination. Choosing Rosaline for the focus of re-vision is particularly apt: re-visioning Rosaline, the silent Petrarchan mistress of poetry written by Romeo, written by Shakespeare, is a double act of liberation that has emerged as a powerful and popular opportunity for feminist adaptation in recent young adult fiction.

Romeo and Juliet Is for Teens, and Other Frustrations

Because of the young age of its protagonists, Romeo and Juliet is frequently associated with youth (rightly so) and therefore (perhaps less rightly) a youthful audience. Young readers and viewers most often encounter Romeo and Juliet in an educational context: it is foisted upon them under the assumption that they will find the adolescent characters relatable and sympathetic and the play, therefore, interesting. A young audience is expected, as Abigail Rokison puts it, to “identify with the play’s central themes of generational conflict, violence, rebellion, and first love.”⁷ John Stephens and Robyn McCallum note that Romeo and Juliet is one of Shakespeare’s most frequently “reversioned” plays.⁸ But Romeo and Juliet’s cultural primacy, its position as the Shakespeare play (or retelling) par excellence for young readers—not necessarily for teens only—seems to be a twentieth-century development. The first edition of Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare (1807)⁹ places Romeo and Juliet as the seventh tale in the second volume—hardly a position of special emphasis. The first edition of E. Nesbit’s The Children’s Shakespeare (1897)¹⁰ places Romeo and Juliet second. Some nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century retellings for children do not include Romeo and Juliet at all.¹¹ Several twentieth-century republications of the Lambs and Nesbit, however, have reordered the retellings to place prime emphasis on Romeo and Juliet. In a single-volume edition of the Lambs’ Tales, published in 1901, the tales have been rearranged: Romeo and Juliet is now the first tale.¹² Similarly, the Opie Library’s 1997 selection of E. Nesbit retellings begins with Romeo and Juliet.¹³ These editorial reorderings give new priority to Romeo and Juliet as the first tale readers will encounter, strongly suggesting that young readers are supposed to like Romeo and Juliet as an individual work and as a gateway drug, as it were, to Shakespeare.

Yet a significant set of young adult adaptations presume frustration and dissatisfaction with Romeo and Juliet, even as they reward the implied reader’s assumed affection for the language and, at the very least, a baseline familiarity with the story. W. B. Worthen locates this baseline familiarity, and its accompanying frustration, in “a contact narrative: Shakespeare in school.”¹⁴ Worthen finds that this first contact, this “celebration of school Shakespeare as an instrument of potentially transformative class ambition structuring mass education,” cannot “overcome the inherent mystification of the project.”¹⁵ None of the participants interviewed for the Nature Theater of Oklahoma Romeo and Juliet, a “dedramatize[d];” production reconstructed from the participants’ unaided memories of the play, can explain why they are forced to read Romeo and Juliet in school.¹⁶ They share a frustration with the experience that lingers even when the play’s exact events have been forgotten. Worthen describes this frustrated, imperfect remembrance of Romeo and Juliet as “the introjection of loss, an unhealing wound … Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare, are sites of shaming failure: the failure of the memory to store a culturally licensed narrative more completely.”¹⁷ In Worthen’s argument, school contact with Romeo and Juliet fails to produce acquisition of cultural capital, and knowledge of their own inability to connect with the play results in shame for readers and viewers.

Millennial transformations of Romeo and Juliet, however, are motivated not by shame but by frustration and a conflicted kind of affection for the characters and Shakespeare’s language. For underlying all of them is a desire to have a “do-over”: to restage the tragedy in a way that allows the lovers, whoever they are, to live. The authors rely on frustration with the ways in which Romeo and Juliet are, again and again, barely thwarted and doomed to tragedy by the flimsiest of coincidences and mishaps. All of the lovers’ attempts to escape the relentless feud their families’ enmity has locked them into, and to define their own destinies, merely deliver them into the even more relentless machinations of a plot from which they cannot escape. The chance meeting at Capulet’s ball; the tidy, direful formulation of “My only love sprung from my only hate”;¹⁸ the plague in Mantua that causes Friar Laurence’s messenger to turn back; Romeo’s arriving at the tomb just too soon; and Juliet’s awakening just too late—all these turning points piled on each other are almost farcical in their sheer volume and relentlessness. What results for the audience or reader, especially given the play’s ubiquitous reputation as the greatest love story ever told, is a frustration with that story. So appropriation is a chance to do it over; to do it right. Given the extent to which Romeo and Juliet is oversold and hypersaturated with cultural familiarity, foregrounding the minor (or non-) characters Rosaline and Benvolio brings a freshness to the act of retelling or transforming the tale.

Enter Rosaline: The Petrarchan Mistress in the Sonnet Sequence and Romeo and Juliet

Rosaline is not, technically, a character in Romeo and Juliet. She never speaks; she does not appear in the dramatis personae. She is a name for Romeo to spin into poetic platitudes, the archetypal distant mistress of the English love s...