Contemporary Adolescent Literature and Culture

The Emergent Adult

Maria Nikolajeva, Mary Hilton, Maria Nikolajeva, Mary Hilton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317160984
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire

Offering a wide range of critical perspectives, this volume explores the moral, ideological and literary landscapes in fiction and other cultural productions aimed at young adults. Topics examined are adolescence and the natural world, nationhood and identity, the mapping of sexual awakening onto postcolonial awareness, hybridity and trans-racial romance, transgressive sexuality, the sexually abused adolescent body, music as a code for identity formation, representations of adolescent emotion, and what neuroscience research tells us about young adult readers, writers, and young artists. Throughout, the volume explores the ways writers configure their adolescent protagonists as awkward, alienated, rebellious and unhappy, so that the figure of the young adult becomes a symbol of wider political and societal concerns. Examining in depth significant contemporary novels, including those by Julia Alvarez, Stephenie Meyer, Tamora Pierce, Malorie Blackman and Meg Rosoff, among others, Contemporary Adolescent Literature and Culture illuminates the ways in which the cultural constructions 'adolescent' and 'young adult fiction' share some of society's most painful anxieties and contradictions.

Chapter 1
Adolescence and the Natural World in Young Adult Fiction

David Whitley

I would like to begin with a disarmingly simple hypothesis – that Young Adult fiction decoupled adolescent self consciousness from its grounding in the natural world. Texts that have come to be seen as seminal in marking off a distinctive territory of Young Adult fiction within the wider domain of writing for children – J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951), S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders (1967), Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate War (1974) – are all resolutely urban in their settings.¹ These seminal novels are all American, of course, but very similar qualities are evident in British novels, such as Colin MacInness’s Absolute Beginners (1959). The protagonists of these novels embody the malaise of their respective eras by finding it impossible to fit in to the established order. Their search for alternative identities, that would make the uneasy transition towards adulthood authentic and meaningful, render their immediate experience – by turns – confused, painful, alienated, and contradictory. But there is little attempt in these novels to seek either consolation or direction from a natural world that might – in other contexts – be seen as an alternative source of value to a social order that appears so endemically false. Whatever dilemmas these protagonists face, they appear to be largely on their own, and the new face of adolescence seems cut off from imagery and associations that might traditionally have been a sustaining undercurrent through difficult rites of passage.

¹ Evidence of novels where the natural world remains intrinsic to young adults’ development can be clearly seen in a range of fiction from earlier or transitional phases, such as: Stella Gibbons Cold Comfort Farm (1932); John Steinbeck The Red Pony (1937); Maureen Daly Seventeenth Summer (1942); Dodie Smith I Capture the Castle (1948); William Golding Lord of the Flies (1954); Harper Lee To Kill a Mockingbird (1960).

In subsequent novels about adolescence that these seminal texts have arguably influenced, such characteristics continue to be in evidence. The dominant tendency is towards an urban realism that engages with some of the extremes of contemporary experience, often in compelling and challenging ways. The big themes are of dislocation, exposure and uncertainty – seen variously in relation to war, immigration, drugs, violence and sexuality – and the novels’ resolutions tend to rely little on images of reintegration and harmony that are founded, as in many more traditional narratives, on tropes of the natural world. This may be in part because many young adult novels limit the scope for development and maturation of their protagonists, and might be more usefully categorised as entwicklingsroman, novels of “mere growth, mere physical passage from one age to the other without psychological development.”² Roberta Seelinger Trites, certainly, has recently developed this notion in persuasive and influential new ways, linking the reluctance of many authors of Young Adult fiction to bring their protagonists to a point of being successfully integrated within adult society (in the manner of earlier exemplars such as Alcott’s Little Women, 1868, or Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, 1908) to problematic issues of power and identity that are inherent within the new form.³ This only partially accounts for Young Adult fiction’s apparent severing, or reconstituting, of the links with the natural world that were so crucial in the fuller, bildungsroman style, novels for young adolescent readers written prior to the 1960s, however.

² Pratt, Annis (with Barbara White, Andrea Loewenstein and Mary Wyer). Archetypal Patterns in Women’s Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981, 36.

³ Trites, Roberta Seelinger. Disturbing the Universe: Power and Repression in Adolescent Literature. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2000, 1–20.

Already, though, my straightforward hypothesis requires some qualification, and we must also acknowledge a theoretical difficulty about the premises on which it is founded. Qualification is required because the dominant tendency identified above exhibits a number of notable exceptions. A small, but important, number of writers, for instance, have set their adolescent rites of passage firmly and centrally within the natural world, often with the protagonists forging a sense of themselves without human companions, in survival narratives that rework the Robinson Crusoe archetype but with contemporary resonances. Some of these, such as Scott O’Dell’s Island of the Blue Dolphins (1960) or Jean Craighead George’s Julie of the Wolves (1972), challenge the assumptions of modern, industrial societies by embodying deep understanding of traditional, non-Western cultures (though perhaps with more ambivalence than the novels’ claims for authenticity might initially suggest, as Maria Nikolajeva has recently pointed out⁴). Other novels, such as Michael Morpurgo’s recent Running Wild (2009), engage with contemporary themes such as the loss of rain forest environments, the threat of species extinction and the relationship between human and animal nature, by recentring the genre of the adventure narrative within exotic, ecologically vulnerable environments in the present day. Other types of narrative, mixing realism with fable or with poetic/fantasy devices (as in David Almond’s novels), can also explore central connections between human consciousness and nature in fruitful ways.

⁴ Nikolajeva, Maria. Power, Voice and Subjectivity in Literature for Young People. New York: Routledge, 2010.

Perhaps the most important qualification to my immodest proposal, though, needs to be made within those novels of adolescence where the connection to the natural world does indeed appear most attenuated. For even these, though references to nature may seem very thin on the ground, offer a touchstone or deeper perspective within which the dominant preoccupations of the novel come into a different kind of focus. Consider, for instance, The Catcher in the Rye. Holden Caulfield is so preoccupied in the novel by his own idiosyncrasies, the phoniness of those around him, and his failure to find a place in the world where he can thrive, that he barely seems to notice the natural world at all. Apart from expressing rather whimsical curiosity to a taxi driver about the movement of ducks in Central Park, there is virtually no mention of a tree, plant, animal, or landscape within the entire, first-person-narrated, novel. Yet Salinger is careful to position the novel, via its title, in relation to pastoral traditions of folk song. Holden may misquote Robert Burns’ famous song about a young girl’s sexual encounter in a field of rye, and twist the song’s imagery to a bizarre focus of his own. But there is no doubt about either the poignancy or centrality of the imagery derived from the song; the obscurity of its significance and the instability of its relation to other themes in the novel simply reflect the degree to which the protagonist drifts free of any secure base. The natural world becomes an absent presence in a novel with no sense of anchorage, a kind of abyss on which Caulfield’s shifting consciousness – like the children he wants to save before they fall over the edge in the rye field – is founded. Similarly in S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders, Ponyboy’s profound response to the beauty of sunsets, which he shares with Cherry, keeps alive a sense of connectedness that is set off against the vortex of disintegration and tragedy propelling the teenage gangland world of the central characters. Hence, even within those exemplars of Young Adult fiction in which nature appears to be dismissed as of marginal concern, there remains evidence of continued connection at a deeper level.

Even if we accept these qualifications however, it should be acknowledged at a theoretical level that recent ecocritical writing has tended to resist the kind of binary distinctions on which my initial hypothesis may appear to be founded. This is partly due to suspicion about the idealising functions of traditional pastoral. Pastoral was reformulated within Romanticism as a site on which authentic forms of experience could be founded, often perceived as resistant to the emergent industrial society’s project of rationalist, scientific mastery of the world. More recently though, attempts to forge a link between authentic forms of human identity and the virtues of the natural world that can be found in much post-romantic writing have been critiqued by major theorists such as Leo Marx (1964), Raymond Williams (1973), and Laurence Buell (1995) for the degree to which this mystifies the operation of social power.⁵ Post-Romantic pastoral has come to be perceived, in adult literature, as frequently naive, even disingenuous, written from positions that unconsciously adopt the assumptions of privilege. As Michael Bennett remarks, sharply, in his study of African American slave writing:

⁵ Buell, Laurence. The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995; Marx. Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1964; Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. London: Chatto and Windus, 1973.

The kinds of spaces that most mainstream environmentalists and ecocritics validate – the pastoral and the wild – were not likely to be appreciated by … slaves whose best hopes lay with negotiating an urban terrain. Slavery changed the nature of nature in African American culture, necessitating a break with the pastoral tradition developed within European American literature.⁶

⁶ Bennett, Michael. “Jeremiad, Elegy and the Yaak: Rick Bass and the Aesthetics of Anger and Grief.” In The Literary Art and Activism of Rick Bass, edited by O.A. Weltzein, 205. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2001.

The perception that the very “nature of nature,” as Bennett puts it, is imbricated in the radically differentiated experience and values of social groups has led to re-evaluation of the relationship between urban and rural archetypes. Some recent thinkers indeed, such as Timothy Morton in Ecology Without Nature, have attempted to move beyond the concept of a separate “nature” altogether, attempting to formulate the basis for what he calls a new “environmental aesthetics.”⁷ Much recent writing has also been taken up with exploring the way ‘nature’ operates – in unacknowledged, residual, or incursive forms – both within urban environments and in liminal spaces, that are neither urban nor rural in a traditional sense. Michael Symmons Roberts and Paul Farley’s Edgelands is characteristic of a different form of nature writing that attempts to move beyond traditional boundaries and categories.⁸

⁷ Morton, Timothy. Ecology Without Nature. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007.

⁸ Farley, Paul, and Symmons Roberts, Michael. Edgelands: Journeys into England’s True Wilderness. London: Jonathan Cape, 2011.

Two points need to be made about the way recent ecocritical theory has shifted our understanding of the relationship between rural and urban experience, however. First, even though the distinction between urban and natural environments is not nearly as straightforward as has sometimes appeared, the excising of referents to natural phenomena from so many of the seminal texts of Young Adult fiction remains a striking feature of this new kind of writing, whose implications still need to be probed and debated. Second, it is by no means clear that tropes of nature within writing with child or adolescent protagonists function in predominantly nostalgic, idealising, or escapist modes that eschew any realistic engagement with the operation of power. Roni Natov’s The Poetics of Childhood has shown persuasively how complex and varied responses in children’s literature have been to the legacy of Romantic conceptions of nature.⁹ And, in pre-1950s literature with adolescent protagonists, the natural world often figures as a space within which issues of authority, exclusion, and otherness are contested and may be only partially resolved. In Anne of Green Gables, for instance, the heroine’s identity as an outsider makes her status within the community unstable, and at times precarious. The emotional intensity of her responses to the natural world around her give dramatic force to a sense of her difference as she grows up – nature becomes almost literally a theatrical space onto which she can project a wilder, more imaginatively indulgent, sense of self than the puritan ethos of her adoptive family’s domestic regime would normally allow. While the extremes of Anne’s self fashioning Romanticism are generally tolerated, and her connection to the natural world is ultimately an integrative force within the rural community depicted, it also sets off a pattern of confrontations in which Anne is repeatedly subject to adult discipline and attempts at control. It is part of the delicate balance that the novel sets out to achieve however, that it is rendered unclear whether the adults or Anne, in her emergent adolescent phase, learn more from these confrontations. Although negotiations between authority and outsiderness take place in a relatively benign context within Anne of Green Gables, it is worth noting that even texts for younger readers whose engagement with the natural world has a predominantl...