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?
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March 12, 2010
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AJ said:
Good article, I completely agree. Do you notice the irony on how they victimize today’s young women who don’t have good literature to teach them to not be victims?
Another problem with today’s media (books, tv, etc.) in general is that it primarily always focuses on the happiness of the protagonist over against the ethics of being honorable. When pursuit of moral behavior is dismissed for whatever will make someone happy, its no wonder that people adopt a victim mindset. Their happiness at a moment is what they draw their identity from, and so anyone attacking their “happiness” is fundamentally destroying the very essence of their perceieved identity. This, of course, will cycle back through the different media as we consume the justification for our own narcissism.
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April 27, 2010
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Natan Press said:
I’m always skeptical of such criticisms of literature, or creative works in general.
I do not disagree with basic idea, summed up by T.S. Eliot. “You are what you read,” but I also think, what you read is who your are.
In the 18th century, the “novel” was considered trash. That is to say, the first “novels” were the kind of thing you get at the airport. They were sleazy, “romantic” novels where people had affairs and murdered each other. That’s when they weren’t talking to ghosts, and riding off with knights in shining armor.
They were read by women. Girls actually. Teenagers. And they were considered the kind of trash that a girl would read. Women were not made for poetry.
Even the exceptions to the rule, those books that are considered greatly influential, had mad prostitute protagonists (Moll Flanders), or sought to teach young girls how to get married well–the lesson being “he may molest you, but it’s cool as long as you successfully resist rape” (Pamela.
Even in drama and poetry, the acceptable written arts, women were objects of passions–either their own, or a male protagonist’s–or bumbling idiots. The “strong” women of Shakespeare were almost unique for 200 years.
So it can be argued that “literature” of the time provided no real good role models for women.
But at the end of the 18th century, a 24 year old girl, who loved “novels” wrote one of her own. The girl was Jane Austen, and the novel was Northanger Abbey. It was about a girl who loved novels.
Northanger Abbey was not published until after Jane Austen’s death (and after a more experienced Jane Austen cleaned it up a bit), but it was the first of a string of novels that would come to define the novel as one of the great art-forms, and make it one of the most important, respected, creative projects of our time.
If not for Jane Austen’s love for trashy novels, lacking role models, we would not be talking about the demise of the art form now.
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April 29, 2010
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David said:
Thanks for the history, can’t say I have as good of a grasp on it as you seem to.
I guess the question becomes, why go backwards? The blame can’t fall squarely on the authors – they aren’t exactly going against the cultural flow – but then again, you point out with Jane Austen that individuals can change the direction of a cultural institution or art form (or create one, as you’re kind of suggesting). Still, it seems Austen must have been one of those rare people (something along the lines of a genius) who is able to pull from limited cultural resources and connect the invisible dots. Maybe the 21st century Jane Austen is right now an 8th grader reading Gossip Girl, but I have my doubts.
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April 29, 2010
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Natan Press said:
There is no going backwards. “Trashy” novels have existed longer than “worthwhile” novels. They never stopped being written.
Simply because they exist doesn’t mean that people are being victimized by them. Gossip Girl is appealing to those who read it for some reason. I believe that in that appeal there is value.
I don’t think anyone gets “self-respect” from what they read. They may get role models. They may get ideas. Gossip Girl may or may not provide “good” role models. But whether or not a book has good role models is not a measure of the book’s worth as literature. There is very little in Russian literature that provides good role-models. I don’t put “good” in quotations in the previous sentence because, objectively, the characters in much Russian literature are not supposed to provide good role models.
Thinking of early interesting English novels, I could say similar things. The works of Defoe were “psychological” explorations of characters, either morally ambiguous, or morally deficient. The greatest example of didactic literature for women, a work that explicitly presented a role model for young women, Pamela (as I mentioned earlier) would, by today’s standards, be a horrible book for young women to learn anything from.
Even at the time, contemporary writers (Henry Fielding) lampooned the Pamela, as they lampooned much of English society.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Apology_for_the_Life_of_Mrs._Shamela_Andrews
Henry Fielding’s work (and Pope’s and Swift’s) were not meant to have positive role-models either. Their works were filled with “ridiculous” people, or used classic forms in new, morally questionable ways (”burlesque”).
Basically, didactic works are never good literature. They fail to provide what good literature provides (a deeper understanding of the world, moral or immoral, and aesthetic aspects which I think require at least some literal ambiguity to exist).
Nancy Drew may be a good role-model, but she is probably not good literature (although, you know, time will tell). If you’re looking for one, you probably wont find the other.
To Kill a Mockingbird is an exception to the rule, but the story of its transformation into a movie is telling. Atticus’ choice at the end of the book was seen as too morally ambiguous by the producers of the film. They dried up Atticus immensely for the movie, made him a black-and-white do-gooder. And they changed the ending of the story, so that Atticus would not have to make the choice of letting Boo get away with murder. The producers wanted a good role model in Atticus, and their interpretation of such meant changing him to something less than he was originally.
Are Gossip Girls girls realistic? Perhaps not. Perhaps it’s just racy drivel, appealing to simple emotions without exploring at all where such actions truly come from. But girls can be mean, and petty, without much apparent reason. Maybe the reason real girls like reading the novels is that the novels discuss a truth in their lives.
There are a lot of stories (books, movies) these days that show a hard environment (highschool) and a protagonist who overcomes the hardship by bravely realizing and professing their moral individuality. Unfortunately, those stories cannot translate into truth for highschoolers.
I just watched an episode of Glee where a fat cheerleader stood up in front of an entire high-school stadium worth of highschoolers and parents, and, when thin cheerleaders were supposed to be doing a dance, the random appearance of the fat cheerleader was greated with patience and interest. She gave an impromptu speech about individuality and how “everyone in highschool feels picked on sometimes.” The audience readily admitted that yes they do feel that way sometimes, and cheered her bravery.
Good role model? Probably. Good literature? Not at all. The situation is so incredibly unrealistic it becomes a joke more than a message of goodness. Unlike Fielding’s work, it’s not meant to be a joke that exposes truth.
I’m not arguing for Gossip Girl. But a book about girls being nasty to each other, that accurately, or interestingly discusses why they act the way they do, would be good literature.
The reader then decides what to gain from the novel, if anything. Is the book Atticus your role model? Or the movie Atticus? The answer depends on who you are. Who you are depends on a lot ore variables than the books you read, even if all you do is read books.
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April 29, 2010
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Natan Press said:
Another illustration of my point.
In 1925 a hollywood scriptwriter named Anita Loos (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anita_Loos) wrote the short novel “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.”
The edition I read of the book had an introduction by a feminist critic, who explained the distinction at the time between the “sexual liberation” of the flappers and the moral liberation of the suffragist movement. Women in both “movements” were opposed to each other. The suffragists were primarily Christian moralists, while the flappers were, you know, strippers.
Anita Loos wrote scripts for hollywood where gun-toting, ample-breasted women go toe to toe with powerful, sexually hungry men, and gradually lose bits of their clothing as the action progresses. Such movies were censored as immoral. Was Anita Loos a liberator of women, or an objectifier/degrader of women?
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes was a book with two central female characters. The brunette I find to be a “good role model” despite being neck-deep in the world of dancers and lascivious men. She is an intellectual observer of her blond friend, who has less moral integrity, but more “success.” The story of the blond, as told by the brunette, is interesting, and educational, though not didactic. The brunette is a “good role model” because she is an observant/intelligent person. The story is attractive/interesting because the blonde is not like the brunette (amongst other things).
The movie “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” is kinda dumb. It doesn’t explore anything. It just has some vapid leading characters with little depth. The movie has little of the value of the book, and less of the immorality.
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April 29, 2010
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David said:
You’re definitely right that there is always garbage, always a demand for it, and that it usually reflects some reality. I guess the question becomes, can that trashy or disturbing or shallow reality be portrayed in such a way that neither inserts artificially “good role models” nor celebrates emptiness? or portrays the acceptance/celebration of emptiness in such a way that the reader questions this? (Obviously, I’m introducing some moral/value ideas which a “literature is for entertainment” stance doesn’t really have to address). I started trying to write a novel last year, and the characters were mainly teenagers, but one of the big things holding me back (besides the fact that I’m not sure I’m cut out for fiction) was the question of whether it could be in any way positive. I meant it to be realistic, which in my opinion means not so pretty, and I’m not one for contrived role models or warm redemptive endings. So where would I be leaving my imagined reader (and myself for that matter?) Would it amount to nothing more than a cultural critique and a snapshot of American teenage life? I hope to pick it back up this summer and keep trying, but those questions remain.
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April 30, 2010
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Natan Press said:
I can’t give you any advice from experience, because I have none. It seems to me, however, that if you want to write a good story about a character, or characters, you have to respect at least one of those characters completely.
That’s not to say that you have to like the character. But you really have to comprehend and sympathize with the character.
You can set out to write a moral tale perhaps by creating a character that would be a role model to you. The power of To Kill a Mockingbird comes from the author’s intense respect for every character. Even the ones that are clearly hateful have a strong voice. They are all strong characters. Atticus is a role model character, but his actions are given no more deference than the actions of any other. He is no more an motivator of the work than any other character.
Dickens sometimes only has one respected character (for instance David Copperfield), and every other character is sort of a joke. That works too. It’s more satirical, but the story is given life by the central character. In David Copperfield, the central character isn’t strong morally. He’s sort of adrift in a sea of ridiculousness. He is strong because Dickens spends a lot of time showing the character dealing with all the ridiculousness. The story then becomes a moral story because of what Copperfield has to deal with. David’s realness is his morality/integrity. The immorality is the ridiculous world.
I guess what I mean by respect is giving the character his due, truly trying to understand the character, rather than just using the character for your own ends.
Perhaps the characters you write will “take on a life of their own.” Or maybe they’ll end up where you expect them to.
One of my favorite books is The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne. It is considered a “proto-novel.” That is, it does not contain all those aspects that Jane Austen put into her works. It is arguably a “silly” work, with constant digressions, leading to conversations about everything from sex to religion to donkeys. It starts with the narrators parents conceiving him, and takes 3 volumes (of 9) to get to his birth (and it never gets much past that). On element the work contributed to the form of the novel was “sentiment.”
Sentiment in Tristram Shandy occurs randomly throughout the book, where the silliness and randomness suddenly stops, and moments of sympathy (sometimes over the top) occur. The characters, ridiculous as they are, suddenly, for brief moments, become people at least the author cares about. Their situation is respected by the author, if only briefly.
In Tristram Shandy, these moments are almost jarring to the reader. Is this guy really crying all of a sudden? That contrast serves to clearly illustrate the “sentiment,” the humanity possible in the character, that which the observer can comprehend and “feel” with the character.
Extending that to the entirety of the work is one thing Jane Austen accomplished (amongst others, like providing a dense culture/society in which the character moves that is given as much care as the psychology/sentiment of the characters themselves).
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April 30, 2010
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David said:
Thanks for all the thoughtful comments.
I agree, and it’s the only way I’ve been able to conceive of it, that creating “real” characters, “giving them their due” as you put it. Is the only hope. The value then becomes making sense of the world not in terms of some moral logic but in showing how things in a particular time/place/group happen to operate, for better or worse. If the result is silly or depressing or shallow then that would be the fault of the world not the author, and if there’s a glimmer of something we might label hope or promise, then the author has not created it but captured something actually there.