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Sharon Deans Teen Gothic: Sex, Death and Autonomy in Young Adult Gothic Literature Sharon Deans Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the award of Doctor of Philosophy English Studies University of Stirling May 2013 1 Contents Acknowledgements and Declaration 2 Introduction: Teen Gothic 3 Chapter 1 – ‘Hovering Between Animal and Angel’: Sexual Desire in Teen Gothic Literature 29 Chapter 2 – Death is Not the End: Death in Teen Gothic Literature 101 Chapter 3 – O Brave New World: Power and Autonomy In Teen Gothic Literature 185 Conclusion 265 Bibliography 268 2 Acknowledgements I wish to acknowledge Prof. Glennis Byron’s help and advice in the production of this dissertation. Declaration I declare that this thesis is my own work and that all critical and other sources (literary and electronic) have been specifically and properly acknowledged, as and when they occur in the body of my text. Signed Date 3 Introduction: Teen Gothic Adolescence – that tricky time when children have not yet reached adulthood – is a time of much disturbance, change and growth. Faced with a body that changes, stretches and grows in all directions, as does the mind, the adolescent finds that they are not who they once were, and that their concerns are not what they once were. According to David Punter, the nature of adolescence is integral to Gothic writing; for him, adolescence can be seen as a time when there is a fantasised inversion of boundaries: ‘where what is inside finds itself outside (acne, menstrual blood, rage) and what we think should be visibly outside (heroic dreams, attractiveness, sexual organs) remain resolutely inside and hidden’ (Punter 1998, 6). However, this is to ‘Gothicise’ adolescents - to view adolescents themselves as Gothic beings – rather than to understand what the true nature of their concerns and fears really are. This thesis intends to investigate, therefore, those fears and concerns as they are represented through the medium of Gothic texts written for adolescents. I propose to examine what happens to the Gothic mode in the gap between young children’s literature and adult fiction and will look at, through the Gothic lens, Young Adult literature which explores the teenager's relationships with issues such as sex, death and autonomy. As the Gothic is ‘erotic at root’ (Punter 1996, 191) and often focused on the centrality of sexuality, I explore the nature of ‘changing bodies’ and consider 4 the adolescent’s burgeoning sexuality and desire for romantic relationships, arguing that the depiction of sexuality in Teen Gothic fiction supplies teenagers with a ‘missing discourse of desire’ that allows them to reappropriate their desire from institutional discourse. However, the Gothic is not just about sex, and I also examine adolescent engagement with the concept of death and demonstrate the ways in which Teen Gothic fiction engages with the concept of noncorporeal continuation; this creates uncertainties about the exact nature of the boundary between life and death and I argue that the ambiguity of the adolescent’s status – no longer a child and not yet an adult – is reflected in their ambiguous relationship with death. Finally, I go on to study how issues of adolescent power and autonomy are represented in Teen Gothic fiction; here I focus exclusively on futuristic dystopian fiction, arguing that these novels contain themes that challenge and reformulate ideas about power and identity. Different societies treat their adolescents in different ways, and, as John Neubauer observes, ‘[i]t can never be proven definitively that the adolescent experience is the same everywhere’ (Neubauer 1992, 4). This thesis is therefore concerned with the concept of adolescence as it pertains to the Western world in general, and the English-speaking Western world in particular. Whilst I draw on literary, sociological, psychoanalytical and cultural studies from North American and European-wide research to support the arguments in my thesis, the specific Young Adult texts under consideration here are drawn from the USA and the UK. In Chapter One I examine Annette Curtis Klause’s The Silver Kiss (1999) and Blood and Chocolate (2007); Vivian Vande Velde’s Companions of the Night (2002); 5 Mary Downing Hahn’s Look for Me by Moonlight (2007); and Patricia Windsor’s The Blooding (1997). In Chapter Two the texts studied are Stephenie Meyer’s vampire tetralogy: Twilight (2006), New Moon (2007), Eclipse (2008) and Breaking Dawn (2008); B.R. Collins’ A Trick of the Dark (2009); Laura Whitcomb’s A Certain Slant of Light (2005); Gary Soto’s The Afterlife (2003); and Carrie Ryan’s zombie trilogy: The Forest of Hands and Teeth (2009), The Dead Tossed Waves (2010) and The Dark and Hollow Places (2011). In my third and final chapter I explore Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games (2008); Michael Grant’s Gone (2009); and Patrick Ness’ The Knife of Never Letting Go (2008). Firstly, in this introduction, I am going to define Young Adult literature and outline its history, then I will talk about the background of adolescents in the Gothic, before moving on to a literature review; after this I will explain my criteria in selecting the texts which I have chosen to concentrate on in my thesis, before finishing with a synopsis of each of my chapters. Young Adult Literature Young Adult literature (or YA literature/fiction) generally refers to texts that are aimed at an audience from about the age of twelve or thirteen years to eighteen or nineteen and mainly includes books whose ‘themes and writing strategies suggest that their audience is at the upper end of the teenage1 years’.2 In general, Robyn McCallum observes: 1 I therefore use the terms ‘teenager’ and ‘adolescent’ interchangeably. 2 That is to say, although the themes and writing strategies of most YA literature would appear to suggest an older teenage audience (fifteen to nineteen), publishers and authors alike target an audience from about the age of twelve onwards, knowing that younger teenagers enjoy the feeling of vicarious participation in reading about the experiences of older teenagers, fictional or otherwise. 6 such texts are informed by the values and assumptions about adolescence that are dominant in the culture at the time of the texts’ production, but the genre can also be loosely defined by its central concerns and interests, characteristic subject matter, narrative strategies and genres. (McCallum 2006, 214) Although McCallum claims that there are some examples of mid-to-late- nineteenth-century fiction aimed at adolescents,3 it has only really been since the latter part of the twentieth century that the production of YA literature has become widespread,4 and fiction written specifically for adolescents is therefore a relatively recent cultural development. The proliferation of twentieth-century YA fiction goes hand in hand with the socio-cultural construct of adolescence itself. According to Roberta Seelinger Trites, adolescence as a social concept did not gain widespread attention until the publication of G. Stanley Hall’s5 Adolescence in 1905: Following Hall’s advice, adults sponsored organized social activities (for example Scouting) for middle-class teenagers, and the concept of adolescence influenced school administrators to grapple with the large numbers of teenagers who were entering high school because industrialization had decreased their economic value on farms. (Trites 2000, 8) 3 For example McCallum cites the adventure stories of Jules Verne, G.A. Henty, R.L. Stevenson and R.M. Ballantyne. In addition the mid-nineteenth century saw the appearance of youth magazines, most particularly boys’ journals, and popular school stories. However, as we will see, it is not really possible to categorise these fictions as YA literature, as the social construct of adolescence had not yet been recognised. Indeed, I would argue that, with the exception of Jules Verne, these decidedly patriarchal British boys’ adventure stories are more concerned with Empire than adolescence. For a brief but comprehensive understanding of the history, themes and genres of YA literature, see McCallum (2006). For a fuller study of all these topics see Literature for Today’s Young Adults, Eds. Alleen Pace Nilsen & Kenneth L. Donelson. 4 The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, first published in 1951, is generally thought to be the first modern YA novel, and has had a determining influence on YA fiction ever since. ‘Originally intended for an adult audience, it was quickly appropriated by a teenage audience … It includes marginally taboo language and subject matter; it is written in the first-person vernacular, using the voice and language of a teenage boy who feels alienated from adult society and his peers; and the tone is frank and confessional. These are all features that have become standard conventions of the genre’ (McCallum 2006, 216). 5 Granville Stanley Hall (1844 – 1924) was a pioneering American psychologist and educator. His interests focused on childhood development and evolutionary theory. 7 Adolescence as we recognise it today, she continues, did not become ‘institutionalized in America until the twentieth century, so it stands to reason that books marketed specifically to this demographic arose as a product of the twentieth century’ (8-9).6 Additionally: teenagers’ increased economic resources and social autonomy in the robust economic years following World War II further increased their market power, making book publishing for older youths an even more attractive industry than it had ever been before. (9) Literature specifically aimed at, and marketed to, adolescents therefore proliferated throughout the Western world only after World War II had changed the respective countries’ economies, nearly forty years after Hall began to call attention ‘to adolescence as a psychological phenomenon’ (9). McCallum also points out that the increased production of YA literature is related to changing social and economic conditions: ‘The lifting of the school-leaving age, steady increase in high school retention rates, and so on, are factors that have extended the period of … adolescence, and hence have expanded the market’ (McCallum 2006, 216).
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