A Look at the Messages Young Adult Fiction Sends Teenage

THEN AND NOW: A LOOK AT THE MESSAGES YOUNG ADULT FICTION SENDS TEENAGE GIRLS IN THE 1970s AND THE 2000s By Beth Ann Goodenberger A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate Studies Division Ohio Dominican University Columbus, Ohio MASTERS OF ARTS IN ENGLISH DECEMBER 2015 i ii CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS………………………………………………………………...…...…iii INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………………...1 CHAPTER 1: A BRIEF OVERVIEW OF YOUNG ADULT LITERATURE…………………...7 CHAPTER 2: THE 1970s…………………………………………………………………………9 Go Ask Alice………………………………………………………………..…………….10 Forever…………………………………………………………………………………...17 Beauty: A Retelling of the Story Beauty and the Beast…………………………………..27 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………….33 CHAPTER 3: THE 2000s………………………………………………………………………..37 Twilight…………………………………………………………………………………..38 City of Bones……………………………………………………………………………..45 The Hunger Games………………………………………………………………………51 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………….55 CHAPTER 3: CONCLUSION…………………...……………………………………………...58 WORKS CITED…………………………………………………………………………………61 iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First, I thank Dr. Martin Brick and Dr. Kelsey Squire for their advice, guidance, and support through this process. They volunteered their time and willingly gave their expertise to help me complete my educational journey. I also thank my husband, James, for taking on all the parenting duties every Saturday in order for me to work on my thesis. Your patience and understanding mean so much to me, and I appreciate all you have personally sacrificed in order for me to achieve this degree. I also thank my mom for instilling in me a love of reading. Finally, I thank my students for being so understanding when I did not have essays graded in a timely manner, or had lesson plans that were haphazardly put together. Thank you for putting up with my frazzled and disorganized mind for an entire semester. 1 INTRODUCTION Of the three people I talked with on a flight from Columbus, Ohio, to Omaha, Nebraska, each person commented on the book I was reading: Throne of Glass, by Sarah J. Maas. The first person I talked with was a woman in her 60s, and as we sat by the gate waiting for the flight, she stared at the cover of the book, featuring a fierce young woman wielding blades, and asked me what grade I was in at school. After my reply that I taught high school, and was not a high school student, she made a face and asked with shock why I was reading a teen book. My second interaction was with a woman in her 30s with a young child. As she sat down by me, she saw the cover of my book and exclaimed happily that she had read that book and loved it. We then proceeded to have a lovely discussion about the main character’s tortured past. My third interaction was with a fourteen-year old girl flying alone. When her phone died midway through the flight, leaving her with nothing to do but stare out the window, I leaned across the aisle and offered her my book to read. She took it hesitatingly, saying she did not really read much, but by the end of the flight, she excitedly told me that she actually enjoyed reading it, and then gaped when I told her to keep it. I later saw her reading it at her gate while her phone charged. My interaction with each woman perfectly captures the attitude many people have toward young adult literature. Older people tend to not see young adult literature as “real” literature, and view it as campy books to only be read by teenagers. To them, seeing an adult reading young adult literature is like seeing an adult reading The Bernstein Bears by themselves. The woman in her 30s, though, represents the current shift in attitude toward young adult literature as more people embrace the stories and characters unique to it. In fact, a study conducted in 2012 by Bowker Market Research found that 55 percent of young adult books were actually purchased by people who were not teenagers. Most of the buyers of young adult literature were between the 2 ages of 30 and 44, with 78 percent of the buyers stating they bought the books to read themselves (Dempsey). The young mother I met is a member of the growing group of people discovering young adult literature and reading it not because their teen is reading it, but reading it because they genuinely enjoy it. The teenager, then, represents her age group well: fewer and fewer teens are reading. In a study by Common Sense Media, 33 percent of 13-year olds said they read for fun only one or two times a year, while 45 percent of 17-year olds said they read for fun one to two times a year (Common Sense Media). However, the teenager I met also displays an important factor of teenagers: when given the right book, teenagers will read. The key is to hand them a book that will engross them, and then enthusiastically talk with them about the book. Since teenagers read so infrequently, and they are so easily influenced during this transitionary stage in their life, the female protagonists teenage girls encounter in young adult novels provide them with examples of what it means to be a young woman. Reading allows teenage girls to experience that female protagonist’s life. The character’s world, actions, dialogue, and beliefs, are all experienced by the reader, an ability called experience-taking. Professors Lisa K. Libby and Geoff F. Kaufman, in their article “Changing Beliefs and Behavior Through Experience-Taking,” state that: when experience-taking occurs, readers simulate the events of a narrative as though they were a particular character in the story world, adopting the character’s mindset and perspective as the story progresses rather than orienting themselves as an observer or evaluator of the character…In the process, readers let go of key components of their own identity—such as their beliefs, memories, personality traits, and ingroup affiliations—and instead assume the identity of a 3 protagonist, accepting the character’s decisions, outcomes, and reactions as their own. (2) Though experience-taking does not happen every time a person reads, when experience-taking does occur, young women can become heavily influenced by the female protagonists in young adult novels. In their study, Libby and Kaufman found that experience-taking occurs more frequently with first-person narratives, which is notable since young adult literature is predominantly first-person (9). They also discovered that with increased experience-taking, readers were more likely to exhibit the behaviors and beliefs of the characters for a short period of time (10). Libby and Kaufman state, “These findings strikingly demonstrate that through their choices in crafting the language and the content of their stories, writers can heighten the likelihood of readers’ taking the character’s subjective experiences as their own and, thus, emerging from the story with their identities, mindsets, and actions transformed” (10). Thus, young adult novels can make a tremendous impact on the reader, influencing and even altering their behavior and thinking. Experience-taking is an important concept to remember when analyzing young adult novels. Teenagers are already at a vulnerable point in their lives as they transition to adulthood, and they are easily influenced during this period. For teenage girls, the female protagonists they read about can provide them with a guide to becoming not only an adult, but also a woman. Experience-taking easily fits in with reader-response literary theory, in which the reader actively engages with the literature. With reader-response theory, the reader’s response, or reaction, is taken into consideration when constructing meaning from the literature. Louise Rosenblatt is a pioneering 4 critic of the reader-response theory. In her book The Reader, the Text, the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work, she defines this approach as: The poem, then, must be thought of as an event in time. It is not an object or an ideal entity. It happens during a coming-together, a compenetration, of a reader and a text. The reader brings to the text his past experience and present personality. Under the magnetism of the ordered symbols of the text, he marshals his resources and crystallizes out from the stuff of memory, thought, and feeling a new order, a new experience, which he sees as the poem. This becomes part of the ongoing stream of his life experience, to be reflected on from any angle important to him as a human being. (12) For Rosenblatt, the reader-response approach is similar to the process an actor takes with a script. She states, “We accept the fact that the actor infuses his own voice, his own body, his own gestures—in short his own interpretation—into the words of the text. Is he not simply carrying to its ultimate manifestation what each of us as readers of the text must do…” (13)? Each reader, then, will derive their own interpretation of a text based on their personal life. She stresses that elements of the reader’s life factor into their interpretation of a text. She writes, “The reader’s attention to the text activates certain elements in his past experiences—external reference, internal response—that have become linked with the verbal symbols. Meaning will emerge from a network of relationships among the things symbolized as he senses them” (11). When Rosenblatt’s theory about how the reader responds to a text is combined with Libby and Kaufman’s experience-taking, it is easy to see how a novel can drastically affect the lives of vulnerable teenage girls. 5 For this paper, I use Rosenblatt’s reader-response theory and Libby and Kaufman’s findings on experience-taking to analyze three popular young adult novels from the two golden ages of young adult literature, the 1970s and 2000s, to determine the messages they send to teenage girls.

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