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Thebes Troutman As Traveling Tween Revising the Family Story

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Thebes Troutman As Traveling Tween Revising the Family Story Thebes Troutman as Traveling Tween Revising the Family Story Margaret Steffler a Abstract: Thebes Troutman in Miriam Toews’s The Flying Troutmans (2008) is a quirky eleven-year-old Canadian tween. In this article I argue that Thebes’s body, skin, and movement offer a textual counterpoint to the rigidity of the story of the nuclear family as it is conventionally told. Aligning the deterritorialization of the family with that of the nation, I argue that Thebes’s marking of her body in an engagingly bizarre tween performance proclaims her separation from the conven- tional family road trip and story, promoting new iterations of family, home, belonging, and origins. It is Thebes as tween who, through creating a zany, some- times disturbing, but articulate identity and culture on her own skin, raises new possibilities of the tween’s role in breaking down borders. Thebes Troutman as a twenty-first-century fictional tween carves out space for new directions and a more fluid Canadian family. Keywords: belonging, deterritorialization, Canadian fiction, home, road trip, skin, tween b The Tween in Twenty-First-Century Canadian Fiction Thebes Troutman in Miriam Toews’s The Flying Troutman is a precocious, articulate, and loquacious eleven-year-old, not unlike L.M. Montgomery’s Anne Shirley. Appearing on the scene exactly one hundred years apart— Anne of Green Gables was published in 1908 and The Flying Troutmans in 2008—Anne, who accidentally dyes her hair green, and Thebes, who delib- erately dyes hers purple, share many traits but head in different directions. This is an article about Thebes Troutman, but I introduce her by way of the most famous eleven-year-old girl in Canadian literature because I believe that it helps to look back as we move forward. Anne is seeking a family, as is Thebes, who is watching hers fall apart. Both characters are vulnerable as they search for love, home, and a place to belong. Ostensibly upbeat and outgoing, Anne and Thebes also experience dark moments of feeling unloved, misunderstood, and unwanted. Anne contributed to stable notions Girlhood Studies 11, no. 1 (Spring 2018): 126-140 © Berghahn Books doi: 10.3167/ghs.2018.110110 ISSN: 1938-8209 (print) 1938-8322 (online) THEBES TROUTMAN AS TRAVELING TWEEN b of family, community, and nation at the beginning of the twentieth century as opposed to Thebes, who dismantles beliefs in differentiated and identifi- able families, communities, and nationalisms at the beginning of the twenty- first century. In explaining the continued popularity of Anne, Irene Gammel argues that “Green Gables was built on national, literary, and aesthetic ideals of home that would resonate with readers who felt uprooted in a modern world of flux” (2008: 138). The Troutmans’ journey reflects and confronts twenty-first-century sensations of up-rootedness and flux caused by global- ization and migrations rather than resisting them or compensating for them. Thebes provides the necessary energy to inspire movement as opposed to settlement, thereby fueling the progression of the family away from its ori- gins, across borders, and beyond comfortable security. In her 2010 introduction to Anne’s World: A New Century of Anne of Green Gables, Gammel describes Anne as possessing “exuberance … vitality … charisma … intensity … [an] indomitable spirit … infectious love … [a] need for love … vulnerabilities [and] charm” (2010: 3). According to Jack Zipes, Anne “is the unknown, the unexpected, that will give a new and deeper meaning to family and community” (2008: xiii). Fewer words are required to describe Thebes, who in 2008 has the advantage of belonging to a clearly demarcated and recognizable group. She is firmly ensconced in the place and role of tween, displaying what are now familiar qualities allo- cated to tweenhood, including the power and advantages that come with the occupation of liminal space between girl and teen, innocence and expe- rience, naiveté and disillusionment, hope and cynicism. The “Groovy Girls stickers all over [her] door” (2008: 30), her collection of Archie comics, her banishment from Zellers “for having a perfume testers war with [her] friends” (39) are a few of the details that proclaim her tweendom and provide a concise sense of who she is. The Oxford English Dictionary’s 2008 entry defines tween as “[a] person who is nearly, or has only just become, a teenager.”1 Claudia Mitchell and Jacqueline Reid-Walsh’s explanation in Seven Going on Seventeen: Tween Studies in the Culture of Girlhood that the “idea of tween” fills “the concep- tual category of the time of transition between a girl’s childhood and her adolescence,” although not as “a stable category” (2005: 13), is a more sat- isfactory definition in its emphasis on a transitory and fluctuating nature. In Tweening the Girl: The Crystallization of the Tween Market, Natalie Coul- ter identifies the tween as a “social construction of consumer discourse” (2014: 4), “embraced and cherished” for the “ambiguity of her transition- ality” (12). In her emphasis on tweens possessing “their own stories, their 127 a MARGARET STEFFLER own media, their own celebrities and their own product lines that cater[ed] specifically to them as transitional subjectivities” (13), Coulter brings a degree of agency into the picture. It is “their own stories,” and specifically the “tween story” of Thebes Troutman as told by Miriam Toews through her narrator, Hattie Troutman, that interests me in its relation, through fic- tion, of a Canadian tween experience that affects family and, by extension, community and nation. Playing backwards at girl and forwards at teen and adult, Thebes displays a strong sense of irony and parody. Mitchell and Reid-Walsh describe this “type of play” in which Thebes indulges as not ‘playing at’ growing up (as with Barbie) but instead ‘playing with’ teen culture. This is present in multiple ways such as making fun of, or deliberately masquerad- ing in the style or dress as in a parody of playing ‘dress up’ when a small child. Since the implied invitation is not to enact a teen role but self-consciously to pre- tend to be a teen also, this suggests that the player may assume a different stance towards the subject of play, namely one of critical distance as opposed to one of imitation. (2005: 3) This establishment of critical distance is very much what Thebes strives for. Her identification of herself as Veronica Lodge from Riverdale to mainte- nance workers at a run-down basketball court highlights her playfulness and quick-thinking—what Coulter identifies as tweenish “frivolousness and fun that evade women” (2014: 12). The fact that the workers, unfazed, actually write down the information for a survey indicates the advantage held by the tween in terms of access to information and identity-switching. Thebes’s familiarity with films such as Psycho and Run Lola Run; magazines such as Q Magazine and Tiger Beat; and musicians such as Beyoncé Knowles may not reach the standards of taste, appreciation, and understanding required by her teen brother Logan, but does provide her with useful cultural capital. Thebes embraces a range of cultural products, including the older and more conventional popular culture of Riverdale, the contemporary Beyoncé, and the more intellectually demanding Run Lola Run (1998), indicating an easy comfort with all that is available to a tween who has not yet been forced to declare allegiances to genres, levels, or quality of culture, but remains open to all possibilities. Thebes also tries out a wide array of languages on her aunt, Hattie, who has returned home from Paris in response to Thebes’s call for help for her mother, Min, who is suffering from severe depression. She imitates, for example, the voices of characters from everyday life, slang, and rap culture, relaying to Hattie that “Popo says when Lo wakes up we’re outie” (2008: 128 THEBES TROUTMAN AS TRAVELING TWEEN b 162) after police officers check on Logan sleeping behind the wheel of the van in a parking lot. Logan has reminded Thebes that she is “a little white kid” and does not “have to talk like Chuck D” (60), but her need to take on the voices of others is part of a compulsive performance of trying on cul- tures, races, ethnicities, ages, and classes outside her own as she strives to reach beyond her identity and limitations as a “little white kid.” Thebes’s language is blatantly twenty-first-century, delivered with parodic mimicry and performative naiveté, placing it firmly in what I would identify as tween talk in its playfulness. Examples include “Roger that, daddio” (119), “True dat, my brotha” (60), “Yo! Dude!” (74), “Word” (80), and “What fresh hell is this?” (121), a mixture of attempts at hipster slang, urban slang, hip-hop, and Dorothy Parker. Thebes’s voice is different, I would argue, from Nomi Nickel’s teen voice in Toews’s A Complicated Kindness, which has hardened the playfulness and vulnerability of the tween talk into cynicism. Thebes’s playful performance is subversive, but also serves to lift up and lighten the heaviness that falls on Hattie and Logan. Thebes falls within the criteria for tween set up by Coulter: she is within the “age range (usually around 8-12 years old)” (2014: 4), dynamically inhab- its “a whole and total moment in the lifecycle” (8), and, most importantly, “[has] access to family resources” and “[inserts] herself into the family econ- omy” (7).2 In Thebes’s case the valued family resources and economy are not based in spending power and consumerism but in the imagination, creativity, and energy so desperately needed by the Troutman family. In an act that par- odies tween buying-power and financial contributions, Toews has Thebes create giant novelty checks, which she randomly presents to family members when moved to do so.
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