Posted on March 12, 2010 - by David

What’s Wrong With Young Adult Literature?

A few weeks ago, I attended a ‘Socratic Conversation’ at Boston University with Karen Siegemund, where we discussed her PhD dissertation, ‘At Least they Read,’ a detailed examination of the trends in the rapidly-expanding category of young adult literature.

Siegemund’s academic and professional expertise is extremely broad. Currently a lecturer in the Math Department at UMass Dartmouth, she also spent six years teaching middle school, and before that, worked for 18 years a scientist in the defense industry, logging over 200 days at sea aboard U.S and foreign civilian and navy vessels doing research and testing on underwater acoustics. She holds a BA in Applied Mathematics, a MA in International Relations, and a PhD in Education and American Culture. But perhaps most importantly for this subject, she is the mother of two teenage daughters.

You Are What You Read

In her introduction to the topic, Siegemund spoke of her own childhood, emphasizing the empowering message she received from her parents – that she was capable of accomplishing anything that she set her mind to. She also reflected on the importance of reading in constructing her identity. As a teenager, she read many of the modern staples- Dostoyevski, Dickens, Austen, the Brontes, through the twentieth century to Hemingway and Fitzgerald – but she also adored Nancy Drew. The characters became her friends and their trials became roadmaps for navigating an increasingly complicated and sometimes frightening world. Plus, it was fun. Looking back at the years following high school, she is able to say with pride that she fought hard to achieve success, and in a scientific niche that was pretty much closed to women for a long time. Now, she tries to share the same message she was given as a child with her daughters, as well as foster a love of reading. But in the process of trying to find new books for her daughters to read, she was disturbed not only by what is being published, but what librarians and bookstores are recommending. While the Nancy Drew series may not represent the pinnacle of literary achievement, Siegemund points out that these books at least give young girls a strong heroine to look up to – (the wikipedia entry has a pretty impressive list of women who cite Nancy as a  major influence in their lives).  But today’s most popular books, she worries, are offering models of behavior and identity that range from mediocre to horrendous.

Siegemund sees a conflict between the idea of reading as merely a necessary skill and the idea that the content of a book contributes to the content of one’s mind. She sums up her own position with the simple phrase, “you are what you read.” It seems that for a long time, this view was considered commonsense. She included this quote from T.S Eliot’s ‘Religion and Literature’ in her presentation:

The author of a work of imagination is trying to affect us wholly, as human beings, whether he knows it or not; and we are affected by it, as human beings, whether we intend to be or not. I suppose that everything we eat has some other effect upon us than merely the pleasure of taste and mastication; it affects us during the process of assimilation and digestion; and I believe that exactly the same is true of anything we read.

Vanity, Vapidity, and Victimization

Probably the most visible example of this new young adult literature is the “Gossip Girl” series, which was adapted for TV in 2007 and is currently in its third season. “Gossip Girl” was the first of several series like it to document the lives of ridiculously wealthy teenagers as they jockey for social position in their prep schools, and, well, have sex with each other. In a 2006 New York Times article, Naomi Wolfe took three of these series (“Gossip Girl” “A-List” and “Clique”) to task. Though she’s obviously critical of the pornographic element in these books, it’s not her biggest qualm:

And while the tacky sex scenes in them are annoying, they aren’t really the problem. The problem is a value system in which meanness rules, parents check out, conformity is everything and stressed-out adult values are presumed to be meaningful to teenagers.

In Karen Siegemund’s talk, the loss of the heroine of earlier modern fiction, who defied norms, persevered, and overcame adversity, emerges as one of young adult literature’s biggest faults. Naomi Wolfe, in her analysis of one of the “Clique” novels, makes a similar observation:

In the classic tradition of young adult fiction, Massie would be the villain, and Claire, the newcomer who first appears as an L.B.R., or “Loser Beyond Repair,” would be the heroine: she is the one girl with spunk, curiosity and age-appropriate preoccupations. Claire and her family live in the guesthouse of the wealthy Block family; Claire’s mother is friends with Massie’s mother, but her father seems to be employed by Massie’s father in an uneasily dependent relationship. In Jane Austen or Charlotte Brontë, that economic dependency on the “great house” would signal that the heroine stands in opposition to the values of that mansion. Yet Claire’s whole journey, in class terms, is to gravitate into the mansion. She abandons her world of innocence and integrity — in which children respect parents, are honest and like candy — to embrace her eventual success as one of the school’s elite, lying to and manipulating parents, having contempt for teachers and humiliating social rivals.

Of course, there are other young adult novels which attempt to treat issues more seriously, but even in these, the ideal female has the same body as the spoiled heroines of “Gossip Girl.” In an article titled ‘ “Meant to Be Huge”: Obesity and Body Image in Young Adult Novels,’ Catherine Quick applauds the fact that obesity is now visible in many young adult novels (apparently it wasn’t a decade ago), but complains that “thin is still represented as the absolute ideal for body image, and the fat person, although willing to accept fat as integral to identity, undoubtedly prefers thin. Fat is still viewed as a decidedly negative body type.” Quick looks at several novels, and finds that only a few offer examples of true self-acceptance:

A truly positive self-image, however, means embracing the so-called negative qualities wholeheartedly, seeing them not as a negative to be accepted and dealt with, but as a positive asset, the essence of an identity. While the other protagonists simply accept their abnormality and move on, Myrtle and Troy embrace it. They come to see their bodies as a legitimate form of beauty, perhaps an “alternative body style” that should be recognized more readily in the thin-obsessed world.

But even Catherine Quick’s message of “true self-acceptance” keeps the body as the source of identity. In other words, embracing one’s body is equivalent to embracing one’s true self.  In reality, embracing a body-image that society disapproves of will probably be extremely difficult for most girls. Perhaps changing the message about what kind of body is ideal is less important than shifting the focus away from the body and on to other ways in which girls can define themselves.

Another trend Siegemund noticed in her reading was how commonly females are cast in the role of the helpless victim. Many of today’s young adult novels deal with sensitive issues like rape and abuse which were off-limits not too long ago. It’s not the depiction of these things that bothers her, but the fact that we don’t see any of the victims “rising up”; they don’t take action themselves but saved through the intervention of an outsider. The question becomes, what good is a story that puts a difficult subject on display if there is no message of empowerment for the reader to find?

At Least They Read

Siegemund is not so much concerned that these books are being written and published, but that they are being endorsed by many librarians and teachers. She recognizes that teens will probably always gravitate towards literature they see as “forbidden fruit,” and doesn’t believe this exploration is necessarily damaging. But when this formerly forbidden material receives an official stamp of approval, it sends a much different message.

One school librarian, Philip Charles Crawford, wrote an article in the Horn Book Magazine two years ago, advocating for whatever gets kids to read. “For me, it doesn’t really matter what they are reading. I don’t measure success by the types of books kids choose, only by the growing number of my students who actively choose to read. And high-appeal books like Gossip Girl have the potential to captivate resistant readers … and, possibly, help transform them into lifelong readers.”

In an article on ‘Racy Reading’ from 2005, Pam Spencer Holley, former president of the Young Adult Library Services Association, sounded off as another member of the “At Least They Read” club:

“Unless you read stuff that’s perhaps not the most literary, you’ll never understand what good works are,” says Holley. “But when you get them hooked on reading, then you can lead them so many other places, as far as books go.”

There’s obviously an awareness that reading today has to compete with TV, internet, and video games as entertainment, and it’s logical to want to make the literature as relevant and accessible as possible. But Holley’s argument is kind of a sad one. What about showing them a world that isn’t quite theirs historically and culturally, but where the characters still deal with many of the same concerns: love, ambition, loss, discrimination, etc. Won’t this make them more subtle and sophisticated readers and people? Is there anything to demonstrate that young readers of YAL do move on to other stuff? If kids aren’t convinced early on that it’s worth it to put a little work into reading, will they ever read anything that is remotely difficult?

While listening to Karen talk, I thought back to the reading I did in high school (1999-2003), and found that off the top of my head, I couldn’t name a single book I was assigned to read that had a female protagonist. With a little concentration, I was able to recall reading To Kill a Mockingbird, and I’m sure there were others with important female characters, but I can say with confidence that the majority of the books we read were centered around the lives of male protagonists. This led me to pose a question: did this burgeoning genre of young adult literature fill some vacuum that young female readers felt when they read stories focused on the opposite sex? I mean, I had Catcher in the Rye’s Holden Caulfield and The Great Gatsby’s Nick Carraway, and even separated by thousands of miles and a century and a half, I could still connect to Raskolnikov. Who did the girls have? The response surprised me a little. Siegemund and the other women in the room (mostly in their mid-twenties) told me they had connected to many of the same male characters that I had. The thought that only a female protagonist could teach them about their place in the world seems to have never crossed their minds. I told my sister, (an avid reader since childhood who is currently working on her Master’s at Columbia), about this experience, and she said she had never felt that the gender of the protagonist was an obstacle for her either. Now I obviously haven’t conducted an extensive survey, and my sample was small and hardly representative; all of my impromptu subjects were well educated and came from environments in which childhood reading was encouraged. But, if these few women, each successful in her own right, have all made lasting connections to characters of both genders, from various nations and historical periods, maybe this can teach us something about the flaws of the current trends. Perhaps by calling more attention to “gender issues” and creating a special body of literature primarily for girls, we are actually taking a step backwards from where feminists were originally trying to go. I’m not saying that girls and boys face exactly the same challenges, or that young adult literature shouldn’t deal with controversial subject matter. But if females are defined first and foremost by their bodies, if their identity crises are usually played out in sexual dramas, if they are shown to be catty, untrustworthy, and uncooperative, or as helpless victims, if their success is measured by the man or the handbag on their arm, if we focus on the fundamental differences between the genders, how will that help us arrive at the goal of real equality? How will that help girls develop true confidence and self-respect?