UWM Digital Commons Orphans

University of Wisconsin Milwaukee UWM Digital Commons Theses and Dissertations April 2021 Orphans Ryan Burden University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Follow this and additional works at: https://dc.uwm.edu/etd Part of the Fiction Commons Recommended Citation Burden, Ryan, "Orphans" (2021). Theses and Dissertations. 2649. https://dc.uwm.edu/etd/2649 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by UWM Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of UWM Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. ORPHANS A NOVEL by Ryan Burden A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English at The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee May 2021 ABSTRACT ORPHANS by Ryan Burden The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 2021 Under the Supervision of Professor Liam Callanan This novel explores the ways in which our concepts of children and family shape our larger perceptions of reality, and vice-versa. It tells the story of a family in rural, upstate New York, using three different perspectives: Grace (the head of household), Eve (her foster child), and Bo, a recent addition to the family. Eve has lived with Grace since childhood, while Bo was taken in after attempting to escape from a rehabilitation camp for boys. Over the course of two days, the children try to manage their own internal conflicts, while Grace does her best to help them. The entire plot is covered in the first of three sections: “Grace.” The following sections: “Eve” and “Bo,” repeat this plotline from their own perspectives. Keywords: fiction, multiple perspectives, children, nature ii TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ....................................................................................................................... 1 Grace: Day 1 .............................................................................................................................. 28 Grace: Day 2 .............................................................................................................................. 78 Eve: Day 1................................................................................................................................ 103 Eve: Day 2................................................................................................................................ 130 Bo: Day 1 ................................................................................................................................. 153 Bo: Day 2 ................................................................................................................................. 176 Ernest ....................................................................................................................................... 199 Curriculum Vitae ..................................................................................................................... 176 iii INTRODUCTION Agency, Reflective Characterization, and The Trouble with Fictional Children In this introduction I will discuss my critical influences, and show how they have affected my narrative choices in this novel. I hope to shed some light on writing child characters in fiction, making the argument that writing effective fictional children comes down to questions of agency and, furthermore, that there are techniques available for writers to address the challenges these questions pose. First, however, I will take a moment to address my novel’s length. It is admittedly short. Not as short as some novels, but shorter than most. Whatever the reason, I have found myself increasingly drawn to the short novel form. If I have any explicit aspirations as a writer, they are all tied up in one day writing something like Herta Muller’s Nadirs (1988), William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow (1979), or Marian Engel’s Bear (1976), all of which are well under 200 pages. While this level of concision may seem strange to some traditional publishers, I’m confident that this is where the literary fiction genre is headed. My confidence is based on conversations with editors, who already encourage their established writers to cut down on word count. It is also based on my reading of Italo Calvino’s prescient book of lectures, Six Memos for the Next Millennium (1988), in which he speaks of “quickness” as a necessary virtue for progressive fiction. 1 Since science has begun to distrust general explanations and solutions that are not sectorial and specialized, the grand challenge for literature is to be capable of weaving together the various branches of knowledge, the various ‘codes’ into a manifold and multifaceted vision of the world (112). Calvino discusses how to accomplish this through both quickness and what he calls “multiplicity,” which, taken together, serve to condense large subjects into concise narratives. It’s clear to me that this same combination—quickness and multiplicity—is most often how we’re forced to understand the modern world. With little time to digest a truly indigestible amount of information, we are forced to consider things as they relate to other things, connecting dots as best we can in an ever-increasing matrix. 2 AGENCY In his recent book Disclosing Childhoods (2018), Spyros Spyrou defines the trouble he sees with the question of agency as it pertains to childhood studies. As part of a much larger call for researchers to pay attention to their own presence “in the research scene”, he suggests that they quit looking for the “‘true’ and ‘authentic’ voices of children, taking into account that children’s behavior, like all human behavior, is highly contextual” (32). Spyrous is concerned with how the field of childhood studies treats its subjects—not at all with fiction—but his points still underscore my own. Most interestingly, he devotes an entire chapter to the question: “What Kind of Agency for Children?”. To explain what he sees as researchers’ “fascination” with children’s agency, he points to “a paradigmatic shift” that had to “be accomplished through bold and strong statements which would challenge dominant and prevailing assumptions about children’s ontology while also offering a renewed agenda for research: if children, and not just adults, are social agents and if they can act and transform their worlds, then a new world could open up for the study of children and childhood” (118). From a fiction writer’s standpoint, the same may be true. If our fictional children are going to be useful characters (or even interesting ones) they must have some degree of agency. The trouble is, real children seem to have so little of it. What they do have, and what many successful child characters have, is what Bordonaro and Payne call “ambiguous agency,” or acting outside of “established and normative conceptions of about childhood and moral and social ideals about the kind of behavior young people should demonstrate” (366). In my own novel, Eve (a teenager) spends most of the story away from adults. Bo (thirteen) has a tendency to wander off—a fact that Grace seems powerless to do anything 3 about. Both characters’ actions can be seen as falling under the umbrella of ambiguous agency. Their habits fit their characters, but they are also narratively necessary. Without them, neither Bo nor Eve would have enough space to act out. But this approach comes with its own troubles. The concept of ambiguous agency, or acting out, limits children’s opportunities for exercising agency to purely the “resistive and [the] transformational” (Spyrous 127). It ignores the possibility of what Spyrou calls “everyday agency,” after Lorenzo Bordonaro’s 2012 essay “Agency Does Not Mean Freedom: Cape Verdean Street Children and the Politics of Children’s Agency.” In short, everyday agency describes the non-resistive actions of children who, for social or familial reasons, are asked to take on what would usually be considered adult work. For example, Spyrous mentions children operating in “so-called ‘crisis situations’ characterized by vulnerability…from their own points of view their expressions of agency are part of everyday life rather than something extraordinary” (128). If children are to exercise this everyday agency, they must be somehow brought into the world of adults. They must be given situations in which they can exercise responsibility. In my own novel, Eve is a good example of this type of agency. She’s older than the other characters— on the cusp of adulthood, in fact—a condition that comes with increased expectations. Grace not only sees her as a child, but also as a co-caregiver. This same sense of responsibility informs Eve’s thoughts about Heather, and her intuitive desire to help. But as Bordonaro notes, even this type of agency does not get to the root of the problem: “Nonetheless, I contest that this use of the notion of children’s limited agency paradoxically reconfirms normative ideas about childhood and child protection that the social sciences have struggled to deconstruct since the 1990s” (422). 4 Children’s agency, he says, is …not based only on a sociological analysis of its pre-conditions but also on a moral assessment of actor’s actions and on assumptions about what actions the exercise of agency should result in, about what agency is. It is, in fact, a false syllogism stemming from the principles of standard morality. If children are involved in violence, sexual activities or other actions that contrast with iconic

Load more