Melinda's Closet: Trauma and the Queer Subtext of Laurie Halse Anderson's Speak
Don Latham
Children's Literature Association Quarterly, Volume 31, Number 4, Winter 2006, pp. 369-382 (Article)
Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/chq.2007.0006
For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/209096
[ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ] Melinda’s Closet: Trauma and the Queer Subtext of Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak
Don Latham
Speak, Laurie Halse Anderson’s Michael L. Printz Honor Book, can be read as a coming-out story. The novel tells the story of Melinda Sordino, who, during the summer before her freshman year in high school, is raped at a party by an older boy who goes to the same school Melinda will attend in the fall. After the attack, Melinda, knowing that she needs help, calls the police, but when the dispatcher answers the phone, she is unable to speak. When everyone discovers that Melinda has called the police—although they do not know why—they ostracize her. Still, in spite of the anger, pain, and loneliness she feels, she cannot bring herself to tell anyone what really happened that night. Instead, she retreats—literally and metaphorically—into a closet in order to keep people from learning the truth and to help her cope with her trauma. Melinda’s narrative, recounting her experiences as an outcast and her slow journey toward recovery, is by turns painful, smart, and darkly comic. What is interesting about it, though, is not so much that it reflects her (re)construction of her identity, but that in so doing it reflects the queerness of the strategies she uses to effect her recovery, strategies that, paradoxically, serve both to suppress her voice and to help her recover/discover a voice with which she can speak the truth. Speak is thus a queer novel in that, by presenting a view from the closet, it questions and subverts dominant heterosexist assumptions about gender, identity, and trauma.
Trauma One way of approaching Anderson’s novel is to see Melinda’s behavior as symptomatic of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). As outlined by psy-
Don Latham is an assistant professor in the College of Information at Florida State University, where he teaches a course in Information Needs of Young Adults. His research interests include magical realism, sexuality and gender, and subversion in young adult literature. He has published essays in Children’s Literature, The Lion and the Unicorn, Children’s Literature in Education, and The Looking-Glass and has written a book entitled David Almond: Memory and Magic (Scarecrow, 2006).
Melinda’s Closet: Trauma and the Queer© Subtext2007 Children’s of Laurie Halse Literature Anderson’s Association. Speak Pp. 369–82.369 chiatrist Judith Herman in her groundbreaking book Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, trauma survivors, including survivors of sexual trauma, often experience a “conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud” (1). This conflict gives rise to symptoms that “call attention to the existence of an unspeakable secret and deflect attention from it” (1). As a result, survivors typically “alternate between feeling numb and reliving the event” (1). Recovery, which Herman clearly expects to occur within the context of psychotherapy, involves three key stages: “establishing safety, reconstructing the trauma story, and restoring the connection between survivors and their community” (3). In contrast, Ann Cvetkovich, in An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures, offers a queer perspective on trauma studies, a perspective that “resists the authority given to medical discourses and especially the diagnosis of traumatic experience as post-traumatic stress disorder” and instead focuses on what she calls “cultural responses to trauma” (4). In her view, trauma cultures share important characteristics with gay and lesbian cultures. She notes, for example, that speaking out as a survivor of sexual abuse is often similar, emotionally and psychologically, to coming out as a gay person (94). In addition, because trauma is often “unspeakable and unrepresentable,” it does not necessarily generate conventional kinds of documentation but instead “giv[es] rise to new genres of expression, such as . . . monuments, rituals, and performances” (7). Likewise, gay and lesbian cultures often produce, of necessity, unorthodox archives that “stand alongside the documents of the dominant culture” (8). In some ways, Melinda does evince the classic symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. These symptoms, according to Herman, can be divided into three main categories: “hyperarousal,” “intrusion,” and “constriction” (35). She explains, “Hyperarousal reflects the persistent expectation of danger; intrusion reflects the indelible imprint of the traumatic moment; constriction reflects the numbing response of surrender” (Herman 35). Melinda is clearly in a state of hyperarousal, constantly on the alert for danger. Just choosing a seat on the school bus on the first day of school proves to be an ordeal for her. When her biology lab partner, David Petrakis, invites her to a pizza party at his house, she turns him down, rationalizing her decision by telling herself, “The world is a dangerous place. You don’t know what would have happened” (Anderson 132). Melinda also experi- ences periodic intrusion of the traumatic event into her consciousness. She says, for example, that she is finding it increasingly difficult to sleep at night. More than once she feels so burdened by the memory that she considers telling someone what really happened. And, try as she might to forget the event, her mind keeps circling back to images of “the party” and “that night.” At the same time, Melinda experiences constriction—withdrawing from her family and friends, allowing her grades to falter, skipping school, spending hours in an abandoned closet she discovers at school, and talking less and less.
370 Children’s Literature Association Quarterly Melinda’s slow process of recovery also resembles the stages of recovery as outlined by Herman, so in what sense may we say that Melinda’s coping and recovery strategies are queer? The term “queer,” according to Karen Coats, sug- gests a resistance to “norms of all kinds,” including norms related to gender and identity (110). Melinda’s strategies are queer in the sense of transgressing the boundaries of accepted norms in the treatment of trauma. Her strategies are largely self-initiated and self-constructed, and her recovery occurs outside the context of professional intervention. Moreover, the particular strategies that shape Melinda’s response to and recovery from her trauma serve to question and undermine accepted norms concerning gender and identity. Specifically, these strategies are the closet, performativity, and the unconventional archive.
The Closet Melinda’s performative strategies are designed largely to conceal and to deflect attention. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that she adopts a performative strategy long associated with gay identity—namely, the closet. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, in Epistemology of the Closet, discusses the closet as a metaphor for homosexual secrecy and disclosure. She notes, however, that “[t]he gay closet is not a feature only of the lives of gay people” (68); in fact “the closet” and “coming out” “now [verge] on all-purpose phrases for the potent crossing and recrossing of almost any politically charged lines of representation” (71). One might assume, then, that the metaphor of the closet has been divested of its specifically gay connection. Sedgwick, however, argues that “exactly the oppo- site is true” (72). Instead, she sees the closet as a metaphor for “a whole cluster of the most crucial sites for the contestation of meaning in twentieth-century Western culture [which] are consequentially and quite indelibly marked with the historical specificity of homosocial/homosexual definition” (72). These sites of contested meaning include secrecy/disclosure, private/public, mas- culine/feminine, innocence/initiation, and knowledge/ignorance—especially sexual knowledge/ignorance (72–73). Sedgwick’s epistemological analysis resonates with Anderson’s novel in several interesting ways. For example, Sedgwick notes that homosexuality is “the love that is famous for daring not speak its name” (67; emphasis added). The word speak is, of course, what Anderson uses as her title, a bit ironically perhaps because for most of the novel Melinda works very hard not to speak. On the night she is raped, Melinda is unable to speak—literally unable because her attacker, Andy Evans, covers her mouth. But later she chooses silence, re- treating into it almost as if taking on a role. When her English class studies The Scarlet Letter, she notices the parallel between Hester Prynne’s reticence and her own. She imagines that the two of them would get along well and might even live together, with Hester “wearing that A, me with an S maybe, S for silent, for stupid, for scared. S for silly. For shame” (101). According to psychologist Annie G. Rogers, people who have experienced sexual abuse often find that
Melinda’s Closet: Trauma and the Queer Subtext of Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak 371 their trauma is “unsayable,” and thus it gets manifested through “unconscious reenactments—but at a terrible cost” (72). The terrible toll that Melinda’s secret exacts on her is evident in a number of ways. In this sense, her silence displays a similarity with what Sedgwick describes as one of the closet’s primary effects, that is, “the reign of the telling secret” (67). In other words, the reticence of closeted gay people concerning their sexuality hints at the very secret inscribed within the closet’s boundaries. Melinda’s secret is a “telling” one in that her behavior (her uncharacteristically poor performance in school, for example), her appearance (most notably her cracked, swollen lips), and her (heretofore uncharacteristic) silence and sullenness betray her. When her rather superficial friend Heather says to Melinda in exasperation, “You are the most depressed person I’ve ever met” (105), it is clear that, while the nature of Melinda’s secret may remain hidden, its existence is obvious even to someone as self-absorbed as Heather. In fact, she tells Melinda, “I think you need professional help” (105). Given that several people, including her parents and guidance counselor, notice the change in Melinda’s behavior, it may seem remarkable that no one is able to decipher the clues and get help for her. But such is the nature of the unsayable. In her work with traumatized children, Rogers observed that “these children were crying out urgently to be heard. . . . [However] this cry was muted: dif- ficult or impossible for adults to discern” (xii). It is the tension between the desire for disclosure and the desire for secre- cy—between what Herman describes as “the will to proclaim” and “the will to deny” (1)—that gives rise to the feelings that Melinda says are “chewing [her] alive” (Anderson 125). Melinda uses her bedroom closet at home as a place to hide her true feelings. She places her mirror there—facing the wall—so that she does not have to confront the reality of her scars, both those on her lips and those on her psyche. One night, after her parents confront her about her failing grades, she writes a runaway note and leaves it on her desk—but she runs no further than her closet, where she falls asleep. Later, when she learns that Rachel, her former best friend, is now dating Andy Evans, she rushes home to her closet, where she buries her face in her old clothes and screams “until there are no sounds left under [her] skin” (162). Melinda is no less closeted at school. Her great achievement early in the school year is discovering, quite by accident, an abandoned janitor’s closet, which she appropriates as her own secret hiding place. This closet was once the domain of the sexist janitors, who now have a new lounge. Melinda says that the girls avoid the new lounge “because of the way [the janitors] stare and whistle softly when we walk by” (26). Melinda claims their old closet, this formerly sexist space, as her own, transforms it into a comfortable, private place, and in so doing attempts to accomplish what Herman identifies as the first stage of recovery—establishing a sense of “reliable safety” (155). Still, even after much cleaning, the closet retains its old smells, suggesting perhaps that sexism can- not be escaped entirely. In a very real sense, what has forced Melinda into the closet—both literally and figuratively—are the sexist attitudes surrounding
372 Children’s Literature Association Quarterly rape and the victims of rape. Clearly, Melinda feels it is somehow better to be ostracized by her (former) friends because they do not understand why she called the police than to face the consequences of having to admit that she called them because she was raped. Speaking up, she intuitively understands, entails potentially greater dangers than not speaking at all. Her fear of the possible social repercussions—of not being believed, for example—drives her into the closet. She gradually refurbishes the abandoned closet, a process she likens to “building a fort” (50), and, indeed, the closet serves just such a function for her, providing “a quiet place that helps [her] hold these thoughts in [her] head where no one can hear them” (51). In some ways Melinda’s closet is the place where she is most alive. She sleeps, cries, draws, and thinks there. It is also worth noting that, whereas she says that she cannot seem to redecorate her bedroom at home to reflect her adolescent personality, she is quite adept at refurbishing this closet at school, adorning the walls with her art work, bringing in books, and adding an old comforter.
The View from the Closet From the queer perspective of the closet, Melinda is able, perhaps a bit more clearly than her peers, to see the performative, nonessentialist nature of identity and gender. Judith Butler, in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, argues that gender and, by extension, identity are not manifestations of some essential inner core but are instead performative, that is, constituted “through corporeal signs and other discursive means” (173). As Rosemary Ross Johnston puts it, “Who I am does not shape what I do; what I do shapes who I am” (135). Sustaining the enactment of gender/identity, according to Butler, “requires a performance that is repeated” (178). Failure to repeat this performance results in “a fluidity of identities” and the possibility of gender/ identity transformation (Butler 176, 179). Gender and identity, then, are “sus- tained social performances” (Butler 180) that can be disrupted, transformed, and even parodied. As Butler says in the preface to the tenth anniversary edi- tion of her book, little did she suspect that Gender Trouble would have such a wide audience or that it would “be cited as one of the founding texts of queer theory” (vii). Offering a postmodern interpretation of the notion that “all the world’s a stage,” the theory of performativity would not at first glance seem particularly queer. As Butler explains, however, her overriding purpose was “to criticize a pervasive heterosexual assumption in feminist theory”: “It was and remains my view that any feminist theory that restricts the meaning of gender in the presuppositions of its own practice sets up exclusionary norms within feminism, often with homophobic consequences” (vii–viii). In other words, there is no “natural” or “essential” role for any man or woman, and that includes sexuality and sexual practices as well. Not surprisingly, Butler’s theory became a cornerstone of queer theory, allowing for subversive, “queer” readings of apparently “straight” texts.
Melinda’s Closet: Trauma and the Queer Subtext of Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak 373 Melinda’s narrative reflects her strong sense that gender and identity are performative, and one suspects that this awareness has developed since, and probably because of, her rape. She notices, with some consternation, how fluid identity can be. At the beginning of the school year, her former best friend Rachel transforms herself into “Rachelle” and begins wearing black stockings, sporting heavy eyeliner, and hanging out with the international students. In her narrative, Melinda starts mockingly referring to her as “Rachel/Rachelle,” signifying not just her disappointment in Rachel’s betrayal of their friendship but also her discomfort with the fact that her ex-friend’s identity has proven to be so fluid. What is really bothering Melinda, of course, is the fragmentation of her own identity. She thinks of herself before the rape as having been “a one-piece talking girl” (97), and she wonders if David Petrakis, her lab part- ner, might like “the inside girl I think I am” (111). But, as she soon discovers, identity is much more complex and fragile than that. Because of her rape, Melinda has become, to borrow a term from Suzette A. Henke, a “shattered subject” (xii, xiv). Henke cites Sidonie Smith’s definition of subject as “the culturally constructed [as opposed to essentialist] nature of any notion of ‘selfhood’” (Smith 189n). It is this notion of her own selfhood that Melinda has been forced to acknowledge precisely because it has been shattered. Confronted by feelings of alienation from her former self and feelings of unease with her current, fragmented self, Melinda at times wants to erase her identity completely. When forced to work out a problem on the blackboard in algebra class, for example, she says that she wishes she could “gobble [her] whole self” (39). After she overhears a group of girls talking about how “creepy” she looks, she goes into the bathroom not just to wash the tears from her face but to try to erase herself completely: “I wash my face in the sink until there is nothing left of it, no eyes, no nose, no mouth. A slick nothing” (45). But the most obvi- ous indication of Melinda’s self-alienation and fragmentation is evident in her attitude toward mirrors and other reflections of her (physical) self. After she is raped, but while still at the party, she sees her face reflected in the window over the kitchen sink and wonders, “Who was that girl? I had never seen her before” (136). Weeks later, she is still unnerved by her appearance. Looking at herself in her bedroom mirror, she is horrified by her scarred lips, which she keeps biting obsessively: “It looks like my mouth belongs to someone else, someone I don’t even know” (17). Consequently, she takes the mirror off the wall and puts it in her closet facing the wall. The mirror stage in developmental psychology, as Jacques Lacan has fa- mously explained, signals an infant’s ability to recognize the reflection in the mirror as herself. This outer image of an integrated whole stands in direct contrast to the infant’s inner feelings of “turbulent movements” (Lacan 2). “This Gestalt,” Lacan says, “symbolizes the mental permanence of the I, at the same time as it prefigures its alienating destination” (2). In repudiating mirrors, then, Melinda is repudiating this illusion of the self as an integrated whole. It is not simply that she does not like who she is right now, although that is no
374 Children’s Literature Association Quarterly doubt part of it. More importantly, she can no longer accept the illusion that she is a whole, integrated self. When she takes over the abandoned janitor’s closet at school, one of the first things she does is cover the cracked mirror with a poster of Maya Angelou, who, in her autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, describes her own childhood rape and subsequent silence. It is unclear whether Melinda knows how closely Angelou’s experience parallels her own, but she admires the fact that one of Angelou’s books has been banned by the school board: “She must be a great writer if the school board is afraid of her” (Anderson 50).1 The only mirror that Melinda can countenance is the three-way mirror she finds in the dressing room at the department store where her mother is manager. The reason this mirror appeals to her is that it reflects her image infinitely and symbolizes her status as a shattered subject. In art class Melinda has become fascinated with Cubism and its ability to portray more than what is on the surface. This mirror exerts just that effect, turning her into “a Picasso sketch, [her] body slicing into dissecting cubes” (124). Melinda finds these multiple, distorted reflections strangely appealing, but she wonders, “Am I in there somewhere?” (124). Symbolically embracing these fractured images of herself, she reaches out and pulls in the side flaps of the mirror, “folding [her]self into the looking glass and blocking out the rest of the store” (124). Melinda’s ultimate growth, I would argue, is not toward any sort of “inte- grated” self but rather toward an acceptance of the performative nature and inherent fluidity of identity. As she begins to recover from her trauma, she imagines that “[s]ome quiet Melindagirl” (188–89), whom she has not seen in a long time, is about to emerge. I think the word some is crucial here in conveying Melinda’s understanding of identity. She does not suggest that the person she really is is about to emerge; she says that some identity is emerging, and she makes a conscious decision to nurture this part (or version) of herself. Closely related to identity is the performance of gender, and Anderson’s novel focuses on how performative strategies both reflect and undermine societal no- tions about appropriate gender roles. Butler, taking her cue from Derrida, notes that performative acts gain their power not only through repetition but also through citationality, which, in short, is “the invocation of convention” (Butler, Bodies that Matter 234). In other words, people often choose their performative acts based on what they perceive is available and/or expected. Aside from her own experience with her attacker, Melinda notices numerous other cases in which men objectify women. As previously noted, she says that all of the girls avoid the janitors’ new lounge because of the way the janitors objectify them as sexual objects. While reading a book on Picasso, she notices that the artist “sure had a thing for naked women” (118). Speculating on why he did not draw naked men, she concludes “[n]aked women is art, naked guys a no-no, I bet” (119). And on the issue of the constantly morphing school mascot, she thinks that “Overbearing Eurocentric Patriarchs would be perfect” (49).
Melinda’s Closet: Trauma and the Queer Subtext of Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak 375 Melinda also observes examples of citationality in the roles women adopt. The cheerleaders, for example, play two different, seemingly contradictory, roles. In one, they represent the ideal of femininity: beautiful, fashionably dressed, perfect young women. In the other, they are promiscuous party girls, who “worship the stink of Eau de Jocque . . . and get group-rate abortions after the prom” (30). When Melinda says that these girls “are our role models” (30; emphasis added), she is alluding to the performative nature of gender. The cheerleaders have adopted two traditional, socially constructed roles for women, and apparently they feel comfortable in both. Neither role reflects any sort of inner essence but is rather a collection of performative strategies that constitute gender identity within a given context. Another kind of feminine role model is offered by “the Marthas,” a group of girls whose supposed raison d’être is to help others. The good acts by which they are known, however, truly are “acts,” for they assign most of the work to would-be members while they themselves spend time criticizing the newcomers’ handiwork and fashion sense. Like the cheerleaders, the Marthas are portrayed as simply adopting one of the feminine roles they see as being available to them. Even Melinda’s mother, who works as the manager of a local department store, falls victim to society’s expectations when she insists on cooking Thanksgiving dinner. Melinda says that this is some- thing her mother sees as “a holy obligation, part of what makes her a wife and mother” (Anderson 58). The fact that the meal turns out disastrously and has to be discarded effectively undermines what Melinda calls the kind of “Kodak logic” that equates the essence of motherhood with excellent culinary skills. Melinda’s friend Heather also demonstrates a keen awareness of the perfor- mative aspects of gender, as is evident when she accepts a job as a model. In her first photo shoot, the photographer encourages her by saying, “Sexy, sexy, very cute. . . . think beach, think boys” (83). Melinda is appalled at how readily Heather steps into this role: “[She] totally gets into it. She throws her head back, stares at the camera, flashes her teeth” (83). This scene not only underscores the performative aspect of gender, but it also typifies the sexual objectification of teenagers by an adult society that both fetishizes and simultaneously denies their sexuality. Because of her rape, Melinda sees her own emerging sexuality as dangerous. Not surprisingly, she yearns for her childhood, which she remembers as a time of innocence and asexuality. Her narrative is filled with childhood reminiscences that serve as a temporary escape from the pain of the present. At the same time, they play a vital role in facilitating what Herman identifies as the second stage of recovery—“remembrance and mourning” (155). What Melinda is remembering and mourning is her childhood. Although she feels, with some embarrassment, that her bedroom looks like that of a fifth grader, at the same time she wishes she were a fifth grader again: “Now,that is a deep dark secret, almost as big as the other one. Fifth grade was easy—old enough to play outside without Mom, too young to go off the block. The perfect leash length” (99; emphasis in original). In other places, she recalls such pleasant childhood scenes as picking apples with her parents, putting up a real tree
376 Children’s Literature Association Quarterly at Christmas, hunting colored eggs at Easter, pretending to be a princess, and playing the part of a tree in the second-grade play. When she stays home from school because she is sick, she starts to imagine her rape as the subject of a talk show, but rather than deal with this traumatic memory, she watches Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood instead and thinks “[a] trip to the Neighborhood of Make-Believe would be nice” (Anderson 165). Melinda also wants to protect her peers from growing up. No doubt it is her perceived violation of childhood innocence that “creeps [her] out” (Anderson 83) during Heather’s photo shoot. Later, when she sees Rachel kissing Andy, her hostility toward her former friend melts and she suddenly thinks of her as a child again: “She is not any part of a pretend Rachelle-chick. I can only see third-grade Rachel who liked barbecue potato chips and who braided pink embroidery into my hair” (150). Witnessing this scene prompts Melinda to send Rachel an anonymous note warning her about Andy. And, when she eventually discovers that Rachel is still dating Andy, she rushes home and goes directly into her closet, where she buries her face in her old clothes and screams. That Melinda buries her face in her old clothes—that is, her childhood clothes—is yet another indication that she yearns to take refuge in what she perceives as a more innocent time of her life. This view of childhood, though, is, like gender and identity, socially con- structed, and as such is problematic. In Pictures of Innocence: The History and Crisis of Ideal Childhood, Anne Higonnet argues that the Romantic notion of the innocent child is changing and is being replaced by what she calls “the Knowing child” (12). This new image of childhood, explains Higonnet, has not lost its innocent connotations, but it has “also acquir[ed] others, exchanging and mingling commercial, sexual, and political forms of power in an increas- ingly tight knot of private and public forces” (148). Heather, much to Melinda’s dismay, would seem to be just such a Knowing child, happily willing to let her innocence and sexuality be commodified. (The Marthas are so impressed with Heather’s modeling job that they begin competing with one another to see who can be her best friend.) Roberta Seelinger Trites argues that “[s]exual potency is a common metaphor for empowerment in adolescent literature” (84). Heather clearly recognizes the power of her sexuality, and she is able to use it to her advantage. Her apparent innocence only heightens the appeal. In fact, it is this perceived innocence, according to James Kincaid, that makes the child so erotic. The allure of the innocent child is that adults can project their own individual fantasies onto it (Kincaid, “Producing” 247–48). The adolescent, then, is particularly vulnerable to this kind of interpretation because “[t]he adolescent has no center apart from a ‘confused’ and ‘transitional’ sexual energy, an energy available precisely because of this emptiness, this powerfully sexual- ized Otherness” (Kincaid, Child-loving 312). I would argue that what Melinda finds so disturbing about Heather’s modeling session is an understanding, at least on some level, of this dynamic and a recognition of her own susceptibility to this kind of objectification.
Melinda’s Closet: Trauma and the Queer Subtext of Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak 377 As Trites notes, much adolescent literature reflects the ideology that sexual- ity is not only powerful but also potentially hurtful, “more to be feared than celebrated” (85). Because of her sexual trauma, it is understandable that Melinda would want to avoid sexuality. However, a retreat into childhood offers not an escape from sexuality but rather, as Jacqueline Rose says, another kind of sexuality: “The child is sexual, but its sexuality (bisexual, polymorphous, per- verse) threatens [adults’] own at its very roots. Setting up the child as innocent is not, therefore, repressing its sexuality—it is above all holding off any pos- sible challenge to our own” (Rose 4). Melinda’s preoccupation with childhood images can be read as an indication of her acceptance of society’s view of the innocent child, but it can also be read as a desire, perhaps a subconscious one, to return to a time in her life when she had a different, less rigidly defined kind of sexuality. Seen in this light, and from Melinda’s vantage point, the potential fluidity of gender/identity is, perhaps, not so disturbing after all.
Coming Out The closet is a safe space where Melinda can begin to recover, but it can only be a temporary haven, not a permanent home. The process of coming out involves her developing ways to express her trauma. For much of the novel, Melinda uses art as a substitute for speech. In art class she transforms her family’s di- sastrous Thanksgiving turkey into a statement about her own entrapment and silence, positioning the head of a Barbie doll inside the carcass of the turkey and then placing a piece of tape over Barbie’s mouth. Forced by her art teacher to read a book on various art movements, she becomes intrigued by Cub- ism, which she says “takes [her] breath away” because it is all about “[s]eeing beyond what is on the surface” (119). She then sketches a Cubist tree “with hundreds of skinny rectangles for branches,” some of which look like “lips with triangle brown leaves” (119). Art thus becomes a way for Melinda, in lieu of speech, to express the unsayable. It is no surprise, then, that art is the only class in which she consistently receives A’s. Her art works—her tree drawings, the turkey sculpture—constitute what Cvetkovich calls “trauma’s archive.” As Cvetkovich explains, “The memory of trauma is embedded not just in narrative but in material artifacts, which can range from photographs to objects whose relation to trauma might seem arbitrary but for the fact that they are invested with emotional, and even sentimental, value” (7–8). Melinda’s archive is both a public and private one—public in the sense that the art teacher and other students in the class witness the creation of the various works throughout the year, and private in the sense that Melinda takes most of these works into her closet at school as a way of making the space her own and reconstructing her identity. This archive, then, constitutes a record, admittedly an ephemeral one, of Melinda’s trauma and recovery. One of the more intriguing aspects of Melinda’s recovery process, and per- haps another example of citationality, is her reason for finally telling someone
378 Children’s Literature Association Quarterly what happened to her. Moreover, this signals the beginning of Herman’s third stage of recovery—“restored social connection” (155). Melinda’s motivation to communicate appears to stem from what Carol Gilligan calls an “ethic of care,” which she associates with the feminine, as opposed to an “ethic of rights” (or justice), which she associates with the masculine (164). Although Melinda clearly sees Andy Evans as a monster—she uses the terms “Beast” and “IT” to refer to him—her reason for finally communicating about her rape is not to see that he is punished for what he has done but rather to keep other women from suffering similar traumas. She communicates the truth about Andy in a rather unorthodox but time-honored public forum—by writing a warning on the wall of one of the stalls in the women’s restroom: “Guys to Stay Away From. . . . Andy Evans” (175). Later, she is gratified to see that her message has provoked a number of responses from other women with similarly bad things to say about Andy. This collaborative graffiti, which Melinda describes as “a community chat room, a metal newspaper” (175), also constitutes an archive, and as such it exemplifies the kind of cultural response to trauma that Cvet- kovich describes in her work. And, finally acknowledging her rape, Melinda warns Rachel/Rachelle about Andy, first sending her an anonymous note and then writing to her during study hall (the librarian in charge has prohibited talking). At first sympathetic, Rachel, who is now dating Andy, balks when she learns who the rapist was. Eventually, though, this seed that Melinda has planted comes to fruition when Rachel breaks up with Andy after he tries to grope her during the prom. At this point Melinda realizes, with some astonishment, that she is ready to quit her closet: “I don’t want to hang out in my little hidey-hole anymore. . . . I don’t feel like hiding anymore” (192). And it is when she is on the verge of coming out that she is most vulnerable. Melinda’s decision to move out of her closet reflects the fact that, metaphorically, she has already come out of the closet as a rape victim. But coming out is risky, as she soon discovers, for there exists both internal and external pressure to remain in. While moving her things out of the closet, Melinda is cornered by Andy, who accuses her of lying to Rachel about his raping her. He then locks the door and attacks her once again—but this time she finds her voice and screams, “NNNOOO!!!” (194). She then slams the base of her turkey-carcass sculpture against the poster of Maya Angelou, breaking the mirror underneath. She quickly grabs a shard of glass and holds it against Andy’s neck and, in a sudden and satisfying reversal of roles, renders him speechless. There is an immediate pounding on the door by the members of the women’s lacrosse team, in response to Melinda’s scream. Opening the door, Melinda not only “comes out” herself, but also “outs” Andy, exposing him for the rapist that he is. The closet, however, as both literal and metaphorical space, does not disappear. In an implicit acknowledgment of the power of the closet, Melinda wisely leaves some of her stuff behind, thinking, “some other kids may need a safe place to run to next year” (192).
Melinda’s Closet: Trauma and the Queer Subtext of Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak 379 The Other Side of the Closet Speak depicts the queer strategies Melinda uses to both conceal and reveal the trauma of having been raped. Much like a Cubist painting or a three-way mirror, Melinda’s identity, as reflected in her narrative, is multiply refracted, revealing the inconsistencies in her performances, and through these fissures we glimpse the other story that Melinda must tell in order to construct a new identity. By and large, Melinda effects her own recovery, and the process of telling/writing her narrative is crucial in the reconstruction of her subjectiv- ity. The narrative—which may be a journal, a diary, a memoir, or some hybrid document—constitutes what Henke calls “scriptotherapy—the process of writ- ing out and writing through traumatic experience in the mode of therapeutic reenactment” (xii). By empowering her protagonist to author her own recovery, Anderson steers clear of a pitfall that plagues many writers and therapists. Ac- cording to Trites, “Male and female authors alike who communicate that sex is to be avoided to protect vulnerable females ultimately end up affirming the patriarchal status quo, no matter how good their intentions” (95). Similarly, Rogers argues that a therapist must not make the mistake of “listen[ing] to [a trauma survivor] only as a victim, as someone so radically innocent that she has no unconscious life at all,” for to do so “erases subjectivity, morality, choice, complexity, and the capacity to transform suffering into strength” (Rogers 109). Although Melinda describes herself as a victim, this is ultimately a role she rejects, as she must in order to recover. By the end of the novel, hav- ing acknowledged the reality of her rape, she also recognizes her “capacity to transform suffering into strength”: “It wasn’t my fault. And I’m not going to let it kill me. I can grow” (198). It is surely significant that, when Melinda, having faced her demons, finally completes the drawing of her tree for art class, she does so—in perhaps another homage to Maya Angelou—by adding birds (and, implicitly, their voices) to its branches. When her art teacher gives her an A+ on her drawing and then asks, “You’ve been through a lot, haven’t you?” (198), Melinda is finally able to recover her voice and, presumably, tell him what she has just told us through her narrative. By performing and transforming her trauma, Melinda succeeds in recovering her ability to speak the truth of her experience and ultimately to re-create her identity. Melinda’s insight, gained at great personal cost, is that gender/identity is neither essential nor fixed but is instead a proliferation of performances. For Melinda, this recognition is the key to the potential healing and liberation that await her on the other side of the closet. For adolescent readers, Melinda’s queer coping strategies, in their questioning of dominant, heterosexist assumptions about gender and identity, offer a similarly liberat- ing potential.
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1. The American Library Association reports that I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was one of the most frequently challenged books in 2004 because of its “[alleged] racism, homosexuality, sexual content, offensive language and unsuit[ability] to age group.” See “Challenged and Banned Books.”
Works Cited Anderson, Laurie Halse. Speak. 1999. New York: Penguin Putnam Books for Young Readers, 2001. Angelou, Maya. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. New York: Random House, 1969. Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge, 1993. ———. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. “Challenged and Banned Books.” American Library Association. 2005. American Library Association. 23 Nov. 2005
Melinda’s Closet: Trauma and the Queer Subtext of Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak 381 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: U of California P, 1990. Smith, Sidonie. Subjectivity, Identity, and the Body. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993. Trites, Roberta Seelinger. Disturbing the Universe: Power and Repression in Adolescent Literature. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2000.
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