Abstract
This chapter argues that reading’s association with girls raises a number of related problems. In texts structured by or in conversation with the romance tradition (both fairy-tales and novels), YA novels for girls are designed to generate empathy in their implied readers. These novels mount an implicit argument for reading’s value that lies especially in a traditional, and traditionally gendered, literary canon: reading connects us, it makes us better, it “humanizes” us. Ultimately, however, these novels may provide a cautionary tale for the humanist defense of reading. Equating reading with humanization often comes in a package of conservative assumptions about gender and reading that threatens to undo the very claims that humanists are making.
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Notes
- 1.
Tania Modleski, in Loving with a Vengeance, outlines the similarities thus:
A young, inexperienced, moderately well-to-do woman encounters and becomes involved with a handsome, strong, experienced, wealthy man, older than herself by ten to fifteen years. The heroine is confused by the hero’s behavior since, though he is obviously interested in her, he is mocking, cynical, contemptuous, often hostile, and even somewhat brutal. By the end, however, all misunderstandings are cleared away, and the hero reveals his love for the heroine. (Modleski 2008, 28)
- 2.
A Room of One’s Own, Chapter 4.
- 3.
As opposed to “genre” fiction or children’s literature, which has always been feminized, and in which I read widely.
- 4.
In those pre-video days, Disney movies were only available in the theater, and I can’t remember seeing any of the fairy-tale movies until my own children watched them.
- 5.
Kirkwood is better known as the co-author of A Chorus Line and the author of P.S. Your Cat Is Dead.
- 6.
Sara K. Day, in Reading Like a Girl, suggests that “adolescent women as a market and audience have been understood as particularly receptive to literature in emotional (rather than intellectual or analytical) terms” (Day 2013, 23). Her definition reminds us that the category of “girl books” is tautological: because certain books emphasize relationships, they are marketed to girls (with, for example, pink covers), which then creates a larger female audience for those books. Furthermore, of course, many YA novels neither construct nor imply gendered audiences.
- 7.
- 8.
Sara Day suggests that these texts emphasize their readers’ affective or empathetic responses to the protagonists (see, e.g., Day 2013, 23).
- 9.
I treat fairy-tales and “classic” romance novels together in this chapter in recognition of the romance tradition’s development from the fairy-tale. My specific example of a frequently retold romance— Jane Eyre —is not only clearly indebted to fairy-tales, it is often retold for adolescent women, making it a useful stand-in for other similar retellings and reimaginings. See Stoneman (1996) and Miller (2001) for more on these retellings.
- 10.
See, for example, Karen Rowe’s groundbreaking “Feminism and Fairy-Tales,” as well as Modleski (2008). More recent work in this field, such as Jones & Schacker’s Marvelous Transformations, has been more nuanced.
- 11.
Day notes that this construction is “white, middle-class, and heterosexual … a norm about which and to whom much popular culture is presented” (Day 2013, 10).
- 12.
Here I draw on Northrop Frye’s theory of modes, which classifies the romance along with folk tales and märchen as texts in which the protagonist is human though “the ordinary laws of nature are slightly suspended” (Frye 1957, 33). While the term is today used mostly reductively, as in discussions of fictions of romantic or sexual attraction (see, e.g., Trites 2000, 84–85) or in combination with other terms (as in “romantic comedy”), the fairy-tale romance and other romance texts (such as Philip Sydney’s Arcadia or Cervantes’ Don Quijote) form an important building block in the European literary tradition. As I’ll explore further in this chapter, and as Tania Modleski and others have noted, many “girls’ books” have their origins in the romance, drawing on such nineteenth-century classics as Jane Eyre , Wuthering Heights , or Dracula.
- 13.
I do, however, discuss a few fairy-tale-inspired fantasies in Chapter 6. In novels by Kristin Cashore, Shannon Hale, and Frances Hardinge, settings inspired by high fantasy can indeed include reading heroines.
- 14.
Cristina Bacchilega writes that “fairy-tales offer symbolically powerful scenarios and options, in which seemingly unpromising heroes succeed in solving some problems for modern children. These narratives set the socially acceptable boundaries for such scenarios and options, thus serving, more often than not, the civilizing aspirations of adults” (Bacchilega 1997, 5). As Trites comments about YA literature, “In a literature often about growth, it is the rare author who can resist the impulse to moralize about how people grow” (Trites 2000, 73).
- 15.
Jones and Schacker focus on reading itself in the Grimm’s “Little Red Cap.” While few fairy-tales actually incorporate scenes of reading, Jones and Schacker argue persuasively for the way that the text of this particular tale actually invites readers to participate in an interpretive game—a game which Little Red Cap loses, but which the huntsman, more skilled than she at both interpretation and speech, wins on her behalf. While their definition of reading includes many kinds of non-textual interpretation, their analysis neatly frames what I argue regarding the use of fairy-tales in YA literature: the mostly female readers depicted in a number of YA adaptations of fairy-tales develop agency through reading.
- 16.
See Gruner (2011) for a consideration of three YA novels that are loose fairy-tale retellings in which the protagonists do develop their agency through the metafictional use of the tales. Some of the argument of this chapter draws on and extends the claims I first began working out in that essay.
- 17.
I am drawing here especially on Patricia Waugh’s definition of metafiction in her book of the same name: “fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artefact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality” (Waugh 1984, 2). As we have already seen, this definition underpins the usages of the term in such later critics as Joe Sutliff Sanders and Claudia Nelson.
- 18.
See Francesca Lia Block, “Wolf,” and others as cited in Zipes (1983).
- 19.
It’s worth noting that, as in the previous chapter, any kind of text can be used for an informational literacy transaction. In this case, the sisters are motivated to do the reading and find the information valuable—unlike the work Melinda (in Speak) and Tom (in King Dork) are assigned.
- 20.
Gruner (2011).
- 21.
See a similar tendency in more traditional school stories such as King Dork and The Perks of Being a Wallflower, both of which include reading lists generated either by the protagonist or by a teacher—reading lists which are now available for purchase through such service as Amazon.com’s “listmania.” See Chapter 2.
- 22.
See Gruner (2011).
- 23.
The cover also recalls the popular Twilight series by using only black, white, and red. YA romances following Twilight have frequently employed these look-alike covers; there have even been repackaged Brontë and Austen novels that visually reference the popular Twilight look.
- 24.
The characters in the chat room come from several different fairy-tale sources. While it seems likely that BeastNYC and SilentMaid are from the two big Disney hits of the early 1990s, Beauty and the Beast and The Little Mermaid (based, of course, on earlier texts, but best known to contemporary readers from those sources), Froggie and Grizzlyguy derive from the Grimms’ “Frog Prince (or Iron Hans)” and “Snow White and Rose Red.” All, of course, are tales of lovers under mysterious enchantments.
- 25.
See Claudia Nelson on children’s metafiction: in many metafictional texts for children, “we may see authors either in a mimetic light, as reporting on their own emotional experiences of reading, or in a didactic one, as seeking to establish for their audience the benefits that reading may have to bestow” (Nelson 2006, 227).
- 26.
It’s interesting to note that the 2017 live-action version with Emma Watson—metafictionally recognizable as Hermione to most of her fans—and Dan Stevens expands the library scene from the animated version, making the Beast a highly literate wooer of his Belle. The two exchange poetry over a snowy bridge and otherwise share texts, but the film makes clear that he is already a reader, more like Edward Cullen (see below) than Kyle.
- 27.
Like Disney’s Beast, he cannot recognize “true beauty” when it is in front of him, focusing instead on superficial, external beauty. After rejecting a witch (again, much as Disney’s Beast does), he is turned into a Beast and given two years to find a transformative love.
- 28.
Here again I must reference Joe Sutliff Sanders’s indispensable article on the critical reader in children’s metafiction—what we see here is “any discomfort inspired by metafiction … blunted by the solace and empowerment that come from relationships with books” (Sanders 2009, 351).
- 29.
Kyle has begun to master what Maryanne Wolf calls “the language of books” (Wolf 2007, 87).
- 30.
Campbell (2016) reads Jane Eyre through “Beauty and the Beast” and “Bluebeard.” Readings associating Jane Eyre with “Cinderella” include Sullivan (1978) and Clarke (2000). The two most important Jane Eyre links in Lindy’s Diary are her July 13 call for a new servitude and, on May 24, calling Kyle’s name and thinking of the mystic call in Jane Eyre.
- 31.
This feminization is rarely valued in either contemporary popular culture or a political culture that seeks to defund, for example, both humanities programs and a variety of social and medical programs that disproportionately affect women.
- 32.
There must be a reference to Jane Eyre in his name, though, as with many of the intertextual references in the novels I’ve been discussing, nothing comes of it.
- 33.
Even Beastly, as we have seen, at least gestures toward literature’s transformative value.
- 34.
The Web site for my own department promises that “deep engagement with literary study [is] a pursuit that develops writing and critical reading abilities along with strengthening communication skills and critical thinking” (english.richmond.edu, accessed Jan 15, 2018).
- 35.
Although Day does not cite Stoneman, it seems to me that both are making similar arguments here about the function of reading, especially of reading first-person romances, for female readers. Again, here we have the focus on reading as interpretation of almost any situation—a focus that again shifts in the YA reworking into a narrower emphasis on textual reading.
- 36.
Edward’s superior reading skills may seem to give the lie to my earlier argument that boys are infrequently associated with reading in romance retellings; Edward’s “otherness” here seems to trump his masculinity.
- 37.
Cabot’s humorous reworkings in The Princess Diaries are here more aligned with Brontë’s satire of Isabella.
- 38.
While readings of Wuthering Heights are notoriously divided on the promise of its second half, I am inclined to read it as a positive revision of the first story. The fact that the second Catherine instructs her cousin Hareton Earnshaw in reading—a scene that forms part of what Gilbert and Gubar denigrate as a diminishing domesticization—to me suggests a positive restructuring of the relationships of the first half (see, e.g., Gilbert and Gubar 1979, 299). But the novel’s bifurcated structure does also gesture to an openness that is strikingly lacking in the Twilight series.
- 39.
Lydia Kokkola, in “Virtuous Vamps,” argues that “despite her transformation into adult and vampire, Bella seems remarkably untransformed by her transition into motherhood … In undermining the transformational power of motherhood, Meyer draws on another well-established convention in children’s literature: the fear of growing up” (Kokkola 2011, 176).
- 40.
Emma’s paper on Jane Eyre makes an argument clearly influenced by Gilbert and Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic, though the text is never referenced and her own paper is received as “too risky,” and characterized by “bold and controversial statements” (Mont 2012, 302). In 2012, the year of the novel’s publication, her reading would be far from controversial, even in most high schools.
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Gruner, E.R. (2019). Misreading the Classics: Gender, Genre, and Agency in YA Romance. In: Constructing the Adolescent Reader in Contemporary Young Adult Fiction. Critical Approaches to Children's Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53924-3_3
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