Young Adult Gothic Fiction

Monstrous Selves/Monstrous Others

Michelle J. Smith, Kristine Moruzi, Michelle J. Smith, Kristine Moruzi

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781786837523
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria gótica, romántica y de terror

This collection is the first to focus exclusively on twenty-first-century young adult Gothic fiction. The essays demonstrate how the contemporary resurgence of the Gothic signals anxieties about (and hopes for) young people in the twenty-first century. Changing conceptions of young adults as liminal figures, operating between the modes of child and adult, can be mobilised when combined with Gothic spaces and concepts in texts for young people. In young adult Gothic literature, the crossing of boundaries typical of the Gothic is often motivated by a heterosexual romance plot, in which the human or monstrous female protagonist desires a boy who is not her 'type'. Additionally, as the Gothic works to define what it means to be human – particularly in relation to gender, race, and identity – the volume also examines how contemporary shifts and flashpoints in identity politics are being negotiated under the metaphoric cloak of monstrosity.

1

Introduction

KRISTINE MORUZI AND MICHELLE J. SMITH

The twenty-first century has seen a marked increase in the Gothic themes of liminality, monstrosity, transgression, romance and sexuality in fiction for young adults. While Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series (2005–8) is one of the most well-known examples of Gothic young adult (YA) fiction, it is part of a growing corpus of hundreds of texts published in the genre since the turn of the millennium, including a number of bestselling series such as Richelle Mead’s Vampire Academy (2007–10), Cassandra Clare’s Mortal Instruments (2007–14) and Maggie Stiefvater’s Shiver (2009–14). These texts encompass a diverse range of subgenres, such as paranormal romance and historical fiction, and a variety of forms, including the short story and graphic novel.

The Gothic is constantly being reinvented in ways that address the current historical moment. Nina Auerbach (1995) explains that ‘every age embraces the vampire it needs’ (145), and Glennis Byron and Sharon Deans (2014) also suggest that ‘each age group does so too’ (89). The traditions of the genre are repurposed and reconfigured in contemporary fiction for young adults to reflect on the importance of young adults for their future possibilities, as well as their present modes of existence and possible resistance. The Gothic is built upon recognisable, yet malleable, generic ‘conventions’ (Sedgwick, 1980) that are rendered familiar through intertextuality, but these intertexts now cross the boundaries of age, as well as history. This collection examines youth culture at a moment in the twenty-first century when ideas about young people are in considerable flux. It contributes to the broader theorisation of young adults and their relationship with popular culture and textual consumption. In particular, it shows how changing conceptions of young adults as liminal figures operating between the modes of child and adult can be mobilised when combined with Gothic spaces and concepts in texts for young people. YA Gothic literature works through a variety of contemporary anxieties pertaining to race, gender, sexuality and technology via its depiction of relationships between humans and non-humans.

Given the lengthy history of the Gothic, a resurgence in Gothic texts in the twenty-first century is unsurprising. What is perhaps more intriguing is the extent to which this resurgence is situated within YA literature. If we accept Catherine Spooner’s argument (2006) that the Gothic takes the form of a series of revivals and that Gothic stories are stories of transgression (Heiland, 2004), then what does the current popularity of YA texts – and the role of young people within this global revival – signify? At least part of the explanation for the popularity of YA Gothic texts comes from how the Gothic does not ‘passively replicate contemporary cultural debates … but rather reworks, develops, and challenges them,’ making the Gothic a ‘mode which searches for new ways of representing complex ideas or debates’ (Smith, Gothic Literature, 8). In this collection we explore how the contemporary resurgence of the Gothic in texts for young people signals the extent of anxieties, many of which centre on youth culture, in the twenty-first century.

Unlike children, who are typically positioned as less knowledgeable and less experienced, young adults are often seen as more mature as they move towards adulthood. Yet, as Anna Jackson, Karen Coats and Rod McGillis explain, ‘The inrushing of the Gothic into children’s culture … speaks among other things to our social order’s sense of unease with the knowingness of children’ (8). YA Gothic literature, then, offers a space to interrogate the ways in which the social order of the twenty-first century responds to the anxieties of the moment, not only in terms of those embodied by the young adult but also broader political, social and cultural concerns. These YA Gothic texts are not simply replicating contemporary debates but are also challenging them.

Changes to adolescence in the twenty-first century have contributed to the rise in YA Gothic fiction. The experience of adolescence in the new millennium is undoubtedly ‘more complicated, uncertain, and extended than ever before’, as young people respond to cultural shifts including prolonged schooling, delayed entry into the labour force, declining marital rates, and the increased possibilities of sexual relationships outside of marriage (Waters et al., 1, 2). These shifts are echoed by changes in the Gothic itself, which Jackson describes as ‘undergoing a process of erosion, mutation and contestation’ (New Directions, 14). The emergence of YA Gothic as a significant genre hybrid in the twenty-first century is a testament to what Victoria Nelson describes as ‘the ultimate mongrel form’ of the Gothic, in which these subgenres ‘simultaneously embed and destroy older conventions’ (8). The connection between youth and monstrosity is most obviously at play in this genre as the monstrous are transformed into heroic figures even as they struggle to overcome their dark origins to retain (or restore) their morality (Nelson, 133).

In ‘Frightening Fiction’, Kimberley Reynolds explains how the ‘zeitgeist arising from the approach and arrival of the new century and millennium’ (154) produced a degree of ‘hysteria’ that ‘takes the form of and is spread by stories’ (155). In her examination of fiction that was dominating popular culture at the turn of the century, she identifies two types of narrative: those that perpetuate this hysteria, and those that combat it (Reynolds, 155). The stories that combat hysteria are, like the fairy tale, designed to ‘externalise and symbolically enact widespread anxieties and then turn them into coherent stories, each with its own closure’ (Reynolds, 155). These two types of narratives contribute to our understanding of YA Gothic fiction that resolves anxieties by producing a sense of closure. In Frances Hardinge’s The Lie Tree (2015), a neo-Victorian Gothic YA novel, the protagonist Faith Sunderley discovers a tree that will provide truths if it is given whispered lies. The impact of these stories on Faith, her family and the island on which they live is resolved as she moves forward with her life, determined to pursue her dreams of becoming a scientist in an era when such prospects were limited for a girl.

Many of the characters in YA Gothic literature, and YA literature more broadly, interrogate the limits placed upon them by the adult authority figures that they encounter, as well as the structural, institutional and patriarchal forces that restrict the cultural and social possibilities available to them. In Vampire Academy (2007) by Richelle Mead, for example, the main protagonist Rose flees from her school with her friend Lissa because she believes that the school cannot keep Lissa safe. The educational institution designed to instruct and protect is, she believes, failing in its responsibilities to its students. Similarly, parents are no longer seen as necessarily capable of protecting teen protagonists and are often entirely bypassed in times of supernatural crisis. Tana in Holly Black’s The Coldest Girl in Coldtown (2013) sets out with a band of fellow teens for a Coldtown (government-enforced location for vampires and ‘cold’ humans who have yet to turn into vampires) when her ex-boyfriend is bitten and her own leg is nicked by a vampire fang. These young adult protagonists threaten the adult social order as they assert their independence and agency.

In YA Gothic literature, the future looms large, with adulthood on the immediate horizon. Jackson et al. argue that ‘Both the Gothic and children’s literature begin as genres haunted by both the future and the past’ (3). The anxieties about these youthful protagonists are situated at the nexus of the past and the future, connected to their families and childhoods, but also looking towards becoming adults. YA Gothic fiction is full of protagonists who are the heroes of their own stories and moving into adult roles and responsibilities while questioning the realities of their world. In Carrie Ryan’s The Forest of Hands and Teeth (2009), for instance, protagonist Mary lives in a village ruled by the Sisterhood and the Guardians. The isolated village is surrounded by fences to keep out the zombies, but after a breach and inspired by family stories about life before the zombies, Mary escapes to seek out the world beyond the fences. Coats argues that the Gothic is ‘an ideal mode of expression for the emerging adolescent’ who actively interrogates the ideals that have been ‘internalized as a child’ and attempts to find ideals ‘that will reflect his or her individual desires and sense of self’ (84). Questions related to identity – What kind of person am I? What values do I hold? – are connected to subjectivity and futurity: Who will I be in the future? The importance of the future is particularly salient in YA Gothic where the haunting appears in the form of an awareness of the future and the challenges that face the youthful protagonists as they move into adulthood. The monsters and supernatural threats that YA Gothic protagonists face also provide teen readers with the vicarious pleasures of adult independence and the dangers that it brings with it from a risk-free vantage point.

Thus, YA Gothic is an obvious genre through which to explore youthful sexual transgressions. Throughout its literary history, some of the most influential Gothic novels have been written by teenage authors – Matthew Lewis wrote his scandalous The Monk (1796) at the age of nineteen, while Mary Shelley began writing Frankenstein (1818) at eighteen. Among the most memorable Gothic heroines are numerous teenage girls, including the eponymous heroine of Jane Eyre (1847); Catherine Earnshaw, who is eighteen when she gives birth and dies in Wuthering Heights (1847); and Dracula’s (1897) Lucy Westenra, who is nineteen when she receives three marriage proposals in one day before becoming a lustful vampire. Although girls’ and women’s lives and the restrictions upon them have transformed substantially since the first and second waves of Gothic fiction in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the majority of the YA Gothic texts published in the past two decades continue to reinforce patriarchal heterosexual norms. Series such as Twilight, for example, are still reproducing the white, middle-class nuclear family. Some of the most exciting YA Gothic texts featuring racially and sexually diverse protagonists, such as the Canadian web series adaptation of Carmilla (2014–16), are not appearing in print but are instead being published in digital forms such as web comics and web series.

Another important anxiety about twenty-first-century youth culture pertains to consumption and consumerism. The Second World War signalled the rise of commodities marketed specifically for teenagers, including rock music, cigarettes, alcohol, fashion and cosmetics. While certain types of consumption are seen as benign, if not positive, others disrupt the model of contained, controlled adolescence. In the twenty-first century, this includes adolescent engagement with digital media. This is a significant shift in globalised youth culture, which simultaneously exposes adolescents’ lives to a global audience while also resisting adult surveillance. Thus, the first decades of the new century have been characterised by increasing resistance to narrow concepts of adolescence that ignore the realities of contemporary life. The rise of YA Gothic can thus be connected to these shifting boundaries of adolescence in which teenagers are sceptical about the possibilities open to them and reject heteronormative nuclear family ideals that are presented for their consumption. Instead, as they turn to global media and culture, they are critical of the ‘structures of modern adolescence’ and are ‘disillusion[ed] with its promises’ (Romesburg, 244). Exacerbated by youth unemployment, rising housing costs, inadequate political leadership and the climate crisis, the ‘promise’ of adulthood and maturity is seemingly out of reach.

Like adolescence itself, YA fiction is a ‘cultural construction’ that shares ‘some of the present day society’s most painful anxieties and contradictions’ (Hilton and Nikolajeva, 1). By far the majority of YA Gothic texts feature white, often middle-class, typically heterosexual female protagonists and, more broadly, ‘the vast majority of speculative narratives … are still written by White authors and screenwriters’ (Thomas, 9).

The rise of activist campaigns such as #OwnVoices and #WeNeedDiverseBooks in the past decade indicates a significant shift in publishing for young people and the increasing focus on the importance of sexual and racial diversity in fiction for young people. Recent publications such as Justina Ireland’s Dread Nation (2019), featuring Jane McKeene being trained to fight zombies at Miss Preston’s School of Combat for Negro Girls, and Tomi Adeyemi’s Children of Blood and Bone (2018), a West African-inspired fantasy after magic has disappeared, indicate that the publishing industry is increasingly willing to publish more texts written by and featuring people of colour, although queer YA Gothic is currently less well represented.

Nevertheless, these exceptional examples are overshadowed by the long tradition of fictional narratives that draw on racial difference in their constructions of the monstrous. In her influential work on the ‘dark fantastic’ in speculative texts for children and young adults, Ebony Elizabeth Thomas writes that the fantastic ‘had need of darkness’ (24) to produce villains and evoke fear. Her most important claim is that ‘in the Anglo-American fantastic tradition, the Dark Other is the spectacle, the monstrous Thing that is the root cause of hesitation, ambivalence, and the uncanny’ (22). Given the strong parallels between the fantastic and the Gothic, contemporary YA Gothic would benefit from the same careful examination of race (Thomas, 25), and we hope that future scholarship in the field will address this gap. While implied readers of YA literature are increasingly asked to identify with ‘the dark and rejected aspects of the self that exist in every person’ (Nelson, 133), fantastic narratives with liberated Dark Others are scarce and rarely popular as audiences cannot suspend disbelief when ‘the expected pattern is subverted’ (Thomas, 28).

Like YA literature, the Gothic genre is similarly defined by its cultural anxieties. Fred Botting observes that the Gothic warns of the ‘dangers of social and moral transgression’, yet it is also characterised by an ambivalence towards these transgressions (Gothic, 7). YA Gothic literature contains a similar ambivalence in which the protagonists simultaneously challenge the assumptions of adults and resist their attempts to define what it means to be a young adult. Twilight’s Bella is a good example here – she is determined to become a vampire in order to be with Edward and rejects her father’s attempts to restrict her decisions. Punter argues that the Gothic can be linked to adolescence through its insistence on an ‘inversion of boundaries’, in which the constraints of childhood are no longer adequate for the liminal young adult who no longer sits comfortably within the space of childhood but who has not progressed into full adulthood (Punter, Gothic Pathologies, 6).

In YA literature, the anxieties associated with this liminality are related at least in part to questions of monstrosity. Young adult bodies become monstrous as they resist categorisation as either child or adult. Spooner argues that the link between ‘becoming an adolescent and becoming a monster’ (106) is a literal one. In the twenty-first century, this monstrous adolescent body is often positioned as a sympathetic character. Botting explains that monsters ‘manifest an appeal that sides with marginalized or excluded groups, thereby steadily turning them from negative to positive images’ (Gothic, 2nd edn, 172). This is significant in YA Gothic literature in which the monstrous character is transformed into a figure deserving sympathy and support, such as Angel in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer television series or the Cullens in the Twilight series. This sympathy is enabled through narration and focalisation from the ‘monster’s’ perspective. Botting explains that contemporary Gothic monsters ‘may look similar’ to historical depictions, but they have ‘different connotations’ in which they are ‘attractive rather than repulsive, desirable rather than disgusting’ (Gothic, 2nd edn, 172). The consequences for these representations in YA Gothic fiction means that readers are encouraged to sympathise with these characters. While their monstrosity is still registered as ‘other’, these characters ‘also give voice to the effects of exclusion’ (Gothic, 2nd edn, 172), thereby raising issues about inclusion and diversity.

As the Gothic works to define what it means to be human, particularly in relation to gender, race and identity, contemporary shifts and flashpoints in identity politics are also being negotiated under the metaphoric cloak of monstrosity. Jackson et al. argue that finding the middle ground between the monster and the monstrous ‘informs the new ethics of children’s Gothic’ (9). Making a sympathetic, inclusive space for the monstrous in YA Gothic texts means developing and refining a definition of monstrosity that accounts for the tensions embodied in the figure of the young adult and considers how this monstrosity might be incorporated into contemporary society.

The interest in YA Gothic was prefigured by an increase in paranormal romance. Ananya Mukherjea points to the ‘surge of romances featuring vampire men, usually white vampire men’ (1) in the period between 1996 and 2011. To a certain extent, the rise in YA Gothic texts – which often feature female protagonists and include romantic plotlines – reflects a broader shift in the twenty-first-century book publishing industry in which girls and women were seen as a large potential market for these kinds of books. In the first decades of the twenty-first century, these ideas almost certainly related to diversity and representation in youth culture. In the past twenty years, the bestselling YA Gothic series have given way to more nuanced modes of representation, reflecting trends in the YA literature market more broadly.

Given the preponderance of romance in most YA fiction and its place within Gothic fiction historically, its role in YA Gothic literature is worth considering. Botting argues that ‘Romance, as it frames gothic, seems to clean up its darker counterpart, sanitising its depravations; it tries to transform, even ennoble, violent gothic energies as a quest for love in the face of death’ (Gothic Romances, 1). The YA Gothic romance can be situated within the tradition of the Female Gothic, which Ellen Moers defined as a mode of Gothic writing in which female writers gave voice to women’s fears about their powerlessness within patriarchal society. Female Gothic plots are typically resolved by ‘affirming a happy ending that reintegrates the female protagonist into a wider community through marriage’ (Brabon and Genz, 5). In contemporary YA Gothic, however, marriage is an unlikely outcome, although some kind of romantic conclusion is typically present. These romantic outcomes, we argue, provide some closure to the anxieties surrounding YA Gothic, reassuring readers that the protagonist has someone to love them, even in troubling times. According to Rosalind Gill, such romantic plotline offers a sense of security in ‘unsettling times’ (226). The idea that there will be a ‘happily ever after’ conclusion means that the fears and anxieties raised in these texts are assuaged through a satisfactory emotional outcome.

Moreover, the romantic plotlines are especially significant in texts aimed at young adult readers since they enable an exploration of sexuality and sexual desire. The metaphoric interpretation of the vampire’s bite as akin to sexual penetration, for example, is part of the appeal of this genre: ‘The appeal [of the Gothic] is the appeal of danger, beckoning us to be just a bit more daring, a bit more wild than our normal lives might allow for’ (Jackson et al., 11). The dangers posed by monstrous Gothic figures are, however, mitigated by their transformation into the sympathetic creatures discussed above. Thus, the taboo sexual experience is mediated through the Gothic, particularly for girls. Linda Christian-Smith argues that the plotting and structure of the romance genre ‘construct femininities’ (45) in relation to love and sexual desire. Yet these plotlines reverse the ‘usual trajectory’ of the Gothic in which ‘a flight from figures of horror and revulsion is turned into a romantic flight towards them’ (Botting, Gothic Romanced, 4), while still maintaining a frisson of danger and excitement to explain their appeal.

In her discussion of the Gothic in twen...