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INVENTING AMERICAN GIRLHOOD: GENDERED PEDAGOGIES IN WOMEN'S MEMOIRS, 1950-1999

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

By

Elizabeth Marshall, M.A.

*****

The Ohio State University 2001

Dissertation Committee:

Professor Leigh Gilmore, Co-Adviser Approved by

Professor Janet Hickman, Co-Adviser Leigh Gilmore Department of English Professor Theresa Rogers

_JjAiet Hickman College of Education UMI Number: 3011112

Copyright 2001 by Marshall, Elizabeth Anne

All rights reserved.

UMI

UMI Microform 3011112 Copyright 2001 by Bell & Howell Information and Learning Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code.

Bell & Howell Information and Learning Company 300 North Zeeb Road P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 Copyright by Elizabeth Marshall 2001 ABSTRACT

In "Inventing Gendered Childhoods" I examine memoirs written by women in

the 1990s who came of age in postwar America in order to trace how girlhood

developed as a separate category from childhood. Although girlhood is often posited in

scholarship and everyday life as the time-bounded period of adolescence, I argue that it

is better understood for the purposes of Education research as a cultural space and

identity that girls are compelled to occupy, and in which they are trained through

various means. I demonstrate that the meaning of childhood as a gendered experience

emerges in a range of cultural locations and institutions, including but not limited to

schools. Through memoirs such as Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted, Dorothy

Allison's Two or Three Things I Know For Sure, and bell hooks' Bone Black, women make visible a range of surreptitious cultural lessons and in the process re-read and counter the repressive girl-rearing practices that framed their own coming-of-age. In particular, women memoirists offer alternative pedagogies that blur the line between adulthood and childhood, tutor us about the insufficiency of the time-bound and gendered identities that the school imposes, and finally disperse the work of "pedagogy" throughout the culture. This project contributes to the debates around girls and education by offering an alternative archive for feminist reflections on girls and schools in the form of women’s memoir. ii Dedicated to Tim and Mimi

111 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A fellowship from the AERA-Spencer research foundations, and the Elizabeth

Gee Dissertation Completion Award from Ohio State’s women’s studies program

provided me with the financial support to focus on researching and writing this

dissertation.

Thanks to; Randy Donelson for dinner, gossip and movies, Lisa Weems for her

intellect and trips to the MAC counter, Cynthia Tyson for her irreverent sense of humor,

Stephanie Kleban for introducing me to Michael, Louise Douce for her wise advice, and my friends and family in the Northwest, especially Angela and my sister Katie.

This project would not have been possible without my dissertation committee.

Thanks to Janet Hickman who taught me everything I know about children’s literature and how to teach it. For encouraging me to undertake this non-traditional project, for reading and re-reading various drafts, and for introducing me to yoga and lattes, I thank

Terry Rogers. A big thank you to my dissertation director Leigh Gilmore for her generous intellectual contribution to this work, and for her kindness and support throughout the writing process.

Finally, I want to thank my fiancée Michael Meneer who offered me encouragement when I needed it the most, and who understood and supported my decision to remain in Columbus until I finished this project.

iv VITA

1990...... Bachelor of Arts, The Evergreen State College

1992...... Masters In Teaching, The Evergreen State College

1996-present...... Graduate Teaching and Research Associate The Ohio State University

PUBLICATIONS

Refereed Articles

Rogers, T., Tyson, C. & Marshall, E. (2000). Living Dialogues in One Neighborhood: Moving Toward Understanding Across Discourses and Practices of Literacy and Schooling. Journal o f Literacy Behavior, 32, No. 1,

Columns

Enciso, P., Rogers, T. & Marshall, E. (1998-2000). Connecting Children With Literature in Classrooms and Communities. Column published quarterly. The New Advocate.

Reviews

Marshall, E. (1999). Review ofSometimes I Can Be Anything: Power, Gender and Identity in a Primary Classroom, by Karen Gallas. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 14, No. 4.

Reports Bertelson, C., Epling, S. Larison, I, Marshall, E., & Melragon, M. {1991).Cultural Mosaics: An annotated bibliography of multicultural resources for the K-12 classroom. Columbus, OH: M.L. King Center Educational Reports.

HELDS OF STUDY

Major Field: Education TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page Abstract ...... iii

Acknowledgments...... iv

Vita...... V

Introduction: The Invention of Gendered Childhood ...... 1

1. Wounded Girls: Rethinking Pedagogies of Injury Through Women's Memoir.. ..7

2. Red, White, and Drew: The Case of American Girlhood ...... 35

3. Dangerous Passage: Pedagogies of Mental Illness ...... 57

4. The Daughter's Disenchantment: Incest as pedagogy in Fairy Tales and Kathryn Harrison’s The Kiss ...... 78

Bibliography ...... 117

VI INTRODUCTION

THE INVENTION OF GENDERED CHILDHOOD

Don't pretend to be something you're not, but don't be who you are. You can never

say no, nor can you really say yes. You must keep everything inside. Life is a partnership: it talks, you listen. Learn to look like you're listening. Hide your

blood. Think pink.

Marcia Aldrich, Girl Rearing

In this project I examine memoirs written by women in the 1990s who came of age in postwar America. Women’s retrospective reflections on the experience of adolescent girlhood offer a site for examining what I will call the invention of gendered childhood. I use this phrase to emphasize that neither gender nor childhood is a natural category, and to differentiate the pedagogies through which girlhood is produced from those that generate the general category of childhood. As it is articulated in materials as diverse as sex-education curricula and girls' series fiction, and produced in locations as various as the family and popular culture, girlhood names a cultural space and an identity that girls are compelled to occupy and in which they are trained through various pedagogical mechanisms. For the purposes of this project, my understanding of pedagogy goes beyond the confines 1 of formal schooling. I concentrate on everyday educative practices within a broad

context in order to investigate the invention of gendered childhood in American

women’s postwar memoirs and to explore the complex mechanisms that produce the

cultural category of girlhood.

Let me place this project in the context of Education research in order to demonstrate what my focus on memoirs will contribute to this important area of inquiry.

Studies of girls in Education divide into two general research emphases: one focuses on how educational institutions and practices produce and sustain gender discrimination, its harm to girls, and its possible remedies. The other addresses the construction of the girl in texts such as children's literature. Both emphases grow out of a broad cultural project informed by feminism and developments in Education that seek to attend to the under-scrutinized lives and representations of girls. This research has produced significant outcomes, including more inclusive curricula and the development of feminist teaching strategies. Yet as important as these developments are, they offer only limited interventions insofar as they overlook the complex relationships between schooling and the larger cultural lessons through which childhood is differentiated from girlhood. In particular the idea of girlhood as a developmental stage ignores how gendered identity is consistently being invented through memory, cultural practices, individual experience, and imagination.

My work builds on previous scholarship about gender and education and proposes a new direction. Instead of looking at the somewhat static category of the girl, or limiting my inquiry to girlhood in relation to curricula or teaching strategies, I examine the mechanisms of cultural construction that gender childhood and produce

2 girlhood as they are represented in women’s memoirs. Following social historian

Michel Foucault, whose work on prisons and mental institutions influences my

methods, I name these mechanisms “gendered pedagogies” and their revisions in

women’s memoirs “counter pedagogies.”

While this project grows out of work in Education, it turns away from traditional

methodologies used in social science research such as qualitative case studies or

quantitative statistical work. I rely instead on feminist theories of literary criticism,

psychoanalysis, and education to theorize how gendered childhood is represented in

women's memoir. Drawing on the disciplines of Women's Studies and English, this

study adds a unique perspective to research on gender in Education. The theories and

methods I use are grounded in feminist scholarship and its commitment to research that seeks to improve the social and political realities of women and girls. In particular, my project builds on feminist theories of girlhood and self-representation, and draws on literary studies, particularly feminist and psychoanalytic literary criticism and theory.

This frame enables me to re-contextualize related educational research in an interdisciplinary and theoretically sophisticated framework related to gender, literature, and theory.

The basic premise of this project is that women memoirists metaphorize the lessons of girlhood into a school that exceeds any particular named, institution, and disperses the work of pedagogy throughout the culture. Thus, this study requires that I turn to educative sites outside of the school and I contextualize my study of women’s memoirs through a range of cultural materials including, but not limited to social science research, popular fiction, psychoanalytic case files and children’s literature.

3 Although disparate, the texts I select for close analysis share a common criteria. Each

provides a textual representation of American girlhood, and each engages with a set of

“gendered pedagogies,” a term I use to refer to the cultural materials and practices

aimed at gendering the child’s body into two disparate heterosexual categories.

In this project, I offer an alternative archive for feminist reflections on girls and

schools in the form of women’s memoir. Memoirs offer an especially significant

practice through which to observe how subjects shape their experience in writing, how

they organize narratives based in memory, and how they reconcile the past with the

present. More specifically, memoirists develop a self-reflexive view of one's own life, a

view that moves beyond who and what women have been told to be and into a story of

the self in which women work consciously to re-shape and interpret these terms. I

provide a brief overview of my project below.

In Chapter One, I review some of the literature about girls in Education. In particular I offer a theoretical intervention in a debate that has construed itself as weighted toward the practical (curriculum reform, pedagogy reform), but which is indeed at the same time a theory of (1) education as an institution through which social change can be effected which (2) takes as its subject (the girl) a figure mired in conflictual theorization.

In the next chapter I further my analysis of the cultural tensions that emerge around the construction of American girlhood through a critique of Nancy Drew. I analyze Nancy Drew because she is the prototypical All-American girl, an icon for white middle-class girlhood as a transitional state. Since Nancy Drew mysteries have often been considered unfit for schools, this chapter serves as a bridge between official

4 and unofficial girlhood lessons. The literary representation of Nancy Drew allows me

to underscore how any attempt to define American girlhood ultimately fails since it is

built on contradictory pedagogies and intersects in salient ways with race and class.

Through Nancy Drew I lay out how identity itself is a complex and active process that

is constantly in flux and contingent on one's physical and cultural location in a

particular social and historical setting.

In Chapter Three I point out how women rely on seemingly private girlhood

experiences, such as reading Nancy Drew, to counter collective ideas about girlhood. In

this context, I read Susanna Kaysen's memoir Girl, Interrupted as an example of how a memoirist might straddle the worlds of fiction and fact as a particular literary strategy.

Leigh Gilmore writes that "texts perform a complex kind of cultural work—never more so than when they seek to represent the 'self.' The cultural work in the case of

Susanna Kaysen's archive of imaginative and documentary materials related to her hospitalization for borderline personality disorder at MacLean Hospital, involves reconciling a mass of competing cultural materials. Writing a memoir offers an occasion to confront and organize these materials, to provide a social context, and to represent the difference between personal and dominant views. Kaysen engages with and counters the gendered pedagogies that underlie her diagnosis as "crazy."

In the concluding chapter I combine all of these elements to produce a reading of Kathryn Harrison's controversial memoir The Kiss. Kathryn Harrison builds her text around familiar fairy tale conventions, uses the metaphor of education to tell a story of

‘ Gilmore Autobiographies, 22. trauma and in the process counters familiar narratives about father-daughter incest.

Harrison brings to the fore one of the central ideas of this study, that girlhood is less a time-bound state than it is a complex psychic space to which adult women return, often as a way to work through traumatic girlhood lessons. CHAPTER 1

WOUNDED GIRLS: RETHINKING PEDAGOGIES OF INJURY THROUGH

WOMEN'S MEMOIR

Girls’ Bill of Rights

Girls have the right to be themselves and to resist gender stereotypes. Girls have the right to express themselves with originality and enthusiasm. Girls have the right to take risks, to strive freely, and to take pride in success. Girls have the right to accept and appreciate their bodies. Girls have the right to have confidence in themselves and to be safe in the world. Girls have the right to prepare for interesting work and economic independence

Girls' Inc.

In 1992, the American Association of University Women published How Schools

Shortchange Girls, a landmark report that detailed gender inequities in the school and sparked "hundreds of new studies on girls in education, ensuring that girls became central to discussions in classrooms, schools, districts, states, and across the nation."'

Throughout the 1990s, girls and schooling arose as a hot topic of research in schools of

' American Institutes for Research, Gender Gaps: Where Schools Still Fail Our Children (New York: Marlowe and Company, 1999), 3; American Association of University Women,How Schools Shortchange Girls: The AAUW Report , paperback edition (New York, Marlowe and Company, 1995). education and a focus of concern in mainstream culture. As Jennifer Baumgardner and

Amy Richards note in their history of contemporary feminism, Manifesta, throughout

the '90s "a group of women and women's organizations turned their gaze on adolescent

girls, and gathered a body of evidence that linked retrograde treatment of females in

school with lowered ambitions and self-esteem."' In addition to the research published

by AAUW, other notable studies include, but are not limited to, a report funded by the

Ms. Foundation entitled "Risk, Resiliency, and Resistance: Current Research on

Adolescent Girls," Myra and David Sadker's Failing at Fairness, and journalist Peggy

Orenstein's SchoolGirlsr

Debates about girls and schooling are not new. In fact, the education of girls has long been a topic that concerns pundits, educators, and parents. Moreover, instances of intensified and renewed interest in gender in the schools often coincides with larger cultural debates. Interventions in the 1970s, for example, were informed by identity- based feminist and multiculturalist political movements. The 1972 Title IX of the

Education Act Amendments, which made it illegal for schools to discriminate against students on the basis of sex, clearly emerged within this context.

' Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards, Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and The Future (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000), 177. ^ Myra Sadker & David Sadker, Failing at Fairness: How Our Schools Cheat Girls (New York; Touchstone, 1994); Peggy Orenstein, SckoolGirls: Young Women, Self-Esteem, and the Confidence Gap (New York: Anchor, 1994)

8 Similarly, throughout the 1970s and 1980s, scholars in the field of education studied the

representations of girls and women in award-winning children's literature as one way to

attend to the under-scrutinized lives of girls and to remedy stereotypical portrayals of

them? Such interventions called for, among other things, the creation of inclusive

curricula and culturally-sensitive teaching practices.

Given that research into girls' schooling peaks during specific cultural periods,

what characterizes the flurry of scholarly activity, school initiatives, and attention to

girls’ education in popular culture during the 1990s? We need to ask two related

questions in order to capture how this recent instantiation of cultural interest in girls and

schools takes shape, against what historical and contemporary backdrops and with what

consequences: Why girls (as a focus on and ongoing concern with gender and schools)?

And why now? While it is hard to pinpoint exactly why the American schoolgirl gained so much attention during the 1990s, its seems that part of her popularity is tied to a general cultural preoccupation with girlhood itself. In the 1990s, numerous girl or grrrl figures populated the cultural landscape, and one of the most visible characters at this time was the schoolgirl, upon whom a variety of ideas about gendered identity were projected, and through whom the lessons that school the pre-gendered body in girlhood

^ These studies rely primarily on the notion that there is a causal relationship between reading and identity construction. Lenore Weitzman et al., "Sex-Role Socialization in Picture Books for Preschool Children," American Journal o f Sociology 77 (1972) : 1125-1150; Judith Kinman & Darwin Henderson. "An Analysis of Sexism in Newbery Medal Award Books from 1977 to 1984," The Reading Teacher 38, no. 9 (1985) : 885-889. For more recent perspectives see, Ann Allen, Daniel Allen & Gary Sigler, "Changes in Sex-Role Stereotyping in Caldecott Medal Award Picture Books 1938-1988," Journal o f Research in Childhood Education 7, no. 2 (1993) : 67-73; Mary Dellmann-Jenkins, Lisa Floijancic & Elizabeth Blue Swadener, "Sex Roles and Cultural Diversity in Recent Award Winning Picture Books for Young Children," Journal o f Research in Childhood Education, 7, no. 2 (1993) ; 74-82, & Peggy Albers "Issues of Representation; Caldecott Gold medal winners 1984-1995," The New Advocate 9, no.3 (1996) ; 267-285. For an overview of feminist social science research on children's literature see Roger Clark, Heidi Kulkin, and Liam Clancy, "The Liberal Bias in Feminist Social Science Research on Children's Books," in Girls, Boys, Books, Toys: Gender in Children's Literature and Culture, edited by Beverly Clark and Margaret Higonnet, 71-82 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1999). 9 are particularly visible. A brief overview of the cultural reinvention of girlhood during

the 1990s provides a context for the renewed activity around and concern for the

education of girls.

Girlhood came of age in the 1990s, in the midst of a convergence of prominent

spectacles around gender and institutions: in 1991 Anita Hill brought the issue of

sexual harassment to the nation's attention in the Clarence Thomas hearing; in 1992 the

large number of women running for political office resulted in it being deemed "the year

of the woman." In 1993, Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill fame and Tammy Rae Garland

both students at the Evergreen State College organized a group named Positive Force

that later organized a grassroots feminist meeting, the Riot Grrrl Convention in

Washington D.C.^ Their success "forced mainstream media to recognize the existence

of young feminists."^ This agitation by women represents a reaction to conservative

attempts to devalue the work of feminists, a perspective that is captured in articles such

as Newsweek's "The Failure of Feminism."® The hot house of cultural attention indicated by these flash points contributed to the birth of the girls' movement.

The girls’ movement echoes the feminist activity in the 1990s. By 1997, the editors of a special issue of Feminist Collections could claim that the "year of the girl" had arrived.^ Girlhood was celebrated in popular cultural books such as Where the

Girls Are: Growing up Female With the Mass Media and anthologies like Adios,

Barbie: Young Women Write About Body Image and Identity , Girls Speak Out:

" For more information on Riot Grrrl see Lynne Vallone "Grrrls and Dolls: Feminism and Female Youth Culture," in Girls, Boys, Books, Toys: Gender in Children's Literature and Culture, edited by Beverly Clark, and Margaret Higonnet, 196-2W (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1999). * Baumgardner and Richards, Manifesta, 91. ® Kay Ebeling, “The Failure of Feminism,” Newsweek (Nov. 19, 1990) : 9. ’ Sally Mitchell, "Girls and Their Ways," American Literary History 10, no. 2 (1998) : 350-359.

10 Finding Your True Self, and Black Girl Talk.^ Memoirs about girlhood, such as Melba

Pattillo Beals' Warriors Don't Cry: A Searing Memoir of the Battle to Integrate Little

Rock's Central High, Mary Karr's The Liar's Club, and those I analyze in this project

filled book displays.® Women wrote about adolescent female sexuality in books such as

SLUT ! and Sex and the Single Girl: Queer and Straight Women on Sexuality}^ In 1993

adults conceived of New Moon Magazine for Girls and Their Dreams, put together a

girls editorial board, and published a magazine "for every girl who wants her voice

heard and her dreams taken seriously." Third-wave feminists created grrrl zines and

websites such as gurl.com. that expanded the category of "girl" to include college-aged

women. Female academics researched previously disregarded topics and popular

cultural artifacts such as Nancy Drew. In short, girlhood was being reinvented in the

1990s by third-wave feminists, by lesbians, by African-American and Latina women, by parents, educators, and girls themselves.

This brief sampling suggests the difficulty of locating the essential American girl—or the state of girlhood in the late-twentieth-century. The proliferation of materials produced by and for girls or grrrls in the 1990s captures less a new era of something called “feminism” than a unique cultural moment in which an ongoing struggle around

* Susan Douglas, Where the Girls Are: Growing up Female With the Mass Media, revised edition ( New York: Times Books, 1995); Ophira Edut, ed., Adios, Barbie: Young Women Write About Body Image and Identity, with a foreword by Rebecca Walker (Seattle: Seal Press, 1998); Andrea Johnson, Girls Speak Out: Finding Your True (New York: Scholastic Press, 1997); The Black Girls, Black Girl Talk (Toronto: Sister Vision Black Women and Women of Color Press, 1995). ® Melba Pattillo Beals, Warriors Don't Cry: A Searing Memoir of the Battle to Integrate Little Rock's Central High (New York: Pocket Books, 1994; Trade Paperback, 1995); Mary Karr, The Liar's Club (New York: Penguin, 1995). " Leora Tannenbaum, Slut! Growing up Female With a Bad Reputation (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1999); Lee Damsky, ed..Sex and Single Girls: Straight and Queer Women on Sexuality (Seattle: Seal Press, 2000).

11 gender, sexuality and social power are made visible through diverse representations of

the American girl. For instance, while third-wave feminists were creating grass-roots

networks like Riot Grrrl and producing magazines like Sassy, corporate America co­

opted and created its own version of girl-power, where rebellion equaled donning a

camouflage Gap T-shirt with clashing sparkle toe-nail polish, or where "gutsy" defined

the girl who gets her guy after shaping her body through a regime of stomach

crunches."

Similarly, in the midst of the girl-power era with its glossy photos of girl-

athletes on Wheaties boxes, adult women, namely Carol Gilligan and Mary Pipher

framed a different snapshot of American girlhood. Gilligan and her colleagues claimed

that adolescent girls were in crisis. The New York Times Magazine ran an article

entitled “Confident at 11, Confused at 16” that detailed Gilligan’s findings and sounded an alarm. '* Parents, teachers and mentors were called to action to rescue girls and to help them develop what New Moon Magazine calls a "healthy resistance to gender inequities." Resources for adults with titles like Brave New Girls: Creative Ideas to

Help Girls be Confident, Healthy, & Happy, and The New Moon Network: For Adults

Who Care about Girls swamped popular culture.'^ Concerned adults such as author

Anna Quindlen wrote: "My daughter is ready to leap into the world, as though life were chicken soup and she a delighted noodle. The work of Professor Carol Gilligan of

" For an in-depth consideration of Sassy see Mary Celeste Kearney's article "Producing Girls: Rethinking the Study of Female Youth Culture," in Delinquents and Debutantes: Twentieth-Century American Girls' Cultures, edited by Sherrie Inness, 285-310 (New York: New York University Press, 1998). Francine Prose, “Confident at 11. Confused at 16,” The New York Times Magazine (January 7, 1990) : 22. See also, Suzanne Daley, “Girls’ Self-Esteem is Lost on Way to Adolescence, New Study Finds,” The New York Times (January 9,1991) : B 1.

1 2 Harvard suggests that some time after the age of 11 this will change, and that even this

lively little girl will pull back, shrink, that her constant refrain will become I don’t

know."*'* In 1994, Mary Pipher's bestseller. Reviving Ophelia brought the image of the

"girl in crisis" into the mainstream, and the mute Ophelia was crowned the prom queen

of the girls' "empowerment" movement.

The girl in the pages of these “Ophelia texts” is rarely defined. This lack of specificity belies the white middle- and upper-middle class norms that often accompany discussions about American girlhood, and suggests that books written by and for adults are often less about any “real” girls than they are about the adults who write them.'^ In the next section, I focus on the autobiographical narratives within several key texts that influenced the theorization of the girl and her formal and informal education into womanhood.

" These books continue to roll of the presses. For instance Girls' Inc. recently published Strong Smart & Bold: Empowering Girls for Life by Carla Fine with a foreword by Jane Fonda (New York: Harper Collins, 2001). Anna Quindlen, “ The Glass Half Empty,” The New York Times (November 22,1990) : A l l . Feminist literary critic Leigh Gilmore argues that the autobiographical often pops up in texts not formally recognized as autobiography. See Autobiographies.

13 I used to think 'girl' was the four-letter word. But today I feel it touched a memory of

how I was when I was a girl. The sense of speaking without double and triple thinking

about what I have to say. Girls are savvy about the choices they try to make. I think all

women should spend time with girls, running and saying what they think.

Carol Gilligan, Hear Us Emerging Sisters'^

1 didn't grow up trying to prove whether I was as good as boys. I just assumed I was.

I'm so thankful for an environment that encouraged me to be the best person 1 could be~

instead of the best woman I could be. This is what I wish for all girls and I hope to

share with a daughter of my own.

Cindy Crawford Strong, Smart & Bold: Empowering Girls For Life‘s

The authors of Manifesta argue that "if you go back to the genesis of any program, book, or magazine that now comprises the girls' empowerment movement, you'll probably find a woman who is revisiting the ghosts of her childhood. This movement is not just led by adult women, in the tradition of Scout leaders and Brownie troop mothers; it is, in many ways, for adult women."’® In the "Ophelia texts”—those texts that feature a girl in crisis— women's own feelings and memories about girlhood surface. In School Girls, journalist Peggy Orenstein writes about how much the girls' voices in her study resembled her own experiences. She writes: "It was not until I saw

Gilligan in HUES, "Girl Power: What's the Real Deal?" Hear us Emerging Sisters 4, no. 3 (1998): 5. " Fine, Smart. Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards, Manifesta, 185-6. 14 how these vibrant young women were beginning to suppress themselves that I realized

how thoroughly I, too, had learned the lessons of silence, how I had come to censor my

own ideas and doubt the efficacy of my actions."'® Similarly, in a chapter entitled

"Then and Now" Mary Pipher returns to her girlhood:

What I am claiming is that our stories have something to say about the way the world has stayed the same and the way it has changed for adolescent girls. We had in common that our bodies changed and those changes caused us anxiety. With puberty, we both struggled to relate to girls and boys in new ways. We struggled to be attractive and to understand our own sexual urges. We were awkward around boys and hurt by girls. As we struggled to grow up and define ourselves as adults, we both distanced ourselves from our parents and felt some loneliness as a result.

It is difficult to separate women's own memories of girlhood from the "real" girls about

whom they write.

These recollections of girlhoods past share a melancholic strain that seeps

throughout the texts. Pipher writes about how the parents she works with mourn the

girl’s passage into adolescence: "In place of their lively, affectionate daughters they

have changelings—new girls who are sadder, angrier and more complicated. Everyone

is grieving."^' Similarly, in the afterward of SchoolGirls, then AAUW president Jackie

De Fazio writes that she "wept" over the stories in Orenstein's book. Carol Gilligan

asserts that listening to young girls "reopens old psychological wounds" in adult listeners.^ In this way, the girl represents the personal and or/collective memories, fantasies, and anxieties of the adults who write her into their texts. Carolyn Steedman

” Orenstein, SchoolGirls, xxvii. “ Pipher, Ophelia, 246. " Ibid., 24. “ Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Pyschological Theory and Women’s Development, revised edition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993) xxiii. See also, Lyn Mike! Brown & Carol

15 points out that "children are 'both the repositories of adults' desires (or a text, to be

'written' and 'rewritten,' to use a newer language), and social beings, who lived in social

worlds and networks of social and economic relationship, as well as in the adult

imagination." “ For Pipher and others the figure of the injured girl arises as a site of

wounded identification with their past.

The girl provides a vehicle through which women return to their girlhood, and

these formulations represent the adult women's desire to soothe a past wound. The girl

is the site of interventions because in the developmental schema she is the subject in

waiting. The girl evoked in the work of Pipher and others is a pre-gendered child

before harm was perpetrated by sexism, bad culture, irresponsible parenting, or harmful

school curricula. The girl as vulnerable figure echoes the Romantic notion that the

child is uncorrupted by "experience" and "culture," and that s/he holds the potential to

save the adult. The girl in these pages is less something stable (e.g., a female self

between x and y) than a figure on the threshold who symbolizes the perilous transition into gender, the pre-gendered state receding behind her as she "becomes a woman."

About female adolescence Pipher writes: "All girls experience pain at this point in their development."^ Through the culturally-loaded figure of the wounded girl, women return to and attempt to name their own girlhood injuries; but, in doing so, displace the real girls in whose name they explicitly claim to seek redress and implicitly install a wounded, adult reminiscence at the center of their project.

Gilligan, Meeting at the Crossroads: Women’s Psychology and Girls' Development (New York: Ballantine, 1992). “ Carolyn Steadman, Strange Dislocations: Childhood and The Idea of Human Interiority 1780-1930 {Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 197. “ Rpher, Ophelia, 150.

16 In her book States o f Injury, political scientist Wendy Brown suggests that

current identity projects are immersed in attempts to achieve reparations for past injuries. “ From this perspective, women's fight for gender equity in education can be read as a reaction to the harm inflicted by the school through its policies and curriculum of exclusion. Girls, the argument goes, are entitled to the same education as the white heterosexual middle-class boy lodged at the center of school curriculum. "True educational reform will happen when girls, as well as boys, become all they can be."“

Brown argues that as subjects make identity claims based on past harm, pain becomes a central element in and a road block to political action. She writes: "In its emergence as a protest against marginalization or subordination, politicized identity thus becomes attached to its own exclusion both because it is premised on this exclusion for its very existence as identity and because the formation of identity at the site of exclusion, as exclusion, augments or 'alters the direction of the suffering' entailed in subordination or marginalization by finding a site of blame for it. But in so doing it installs its pain over its unredeemed history in the very foundation of its political claim, in its demand for recognition as identity."^ After defining the reason for their powerlessness over the past injury, let's say "sexism," what results is a "politics of recrimination that seeks to avenge the hurt even while it reaffirms it, discursively codifies it. Politicized identity thus enunciates itself, makes claims for itself, only by entrenching, restating, dramatizing, and inscribing its pain in politics; it can hold out no

“ Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton; Princeton University Press, 1995). “ DeFazio in Orenstein, SchoolGirls, 277. ” Brown, States, 74.

17 future—for itself or others — that triumphs over this pain."“ According to Brown

politicized identity, is only possible through a continual return to a narcissistic wound

and an attempt to receive compensation from the perpetrator in order to erase the

humiliation of past trauma.’®

One need only watch an episode of Fox's Boston Public or rent a movie like

Dangerous Minds to surmise that popular discourses about education construct schools

as faulty but ultimately empowering places where good-hearted teachers intervene and

change the lives of downtrodden students. In the 1990s, the "wounded girl" was offered a seat at the front of the class. Feminist interventions into the school built on the idea of saving, empowering, or reclaiming the (heterosexual) girl's identity. Through the figure of the girl injured by exclusion and sexism, the school, its curricula and its practices, became a renewed focus of feminist concern, and the injured girl silenced on the margins of classrooms became the central figure in the fight for more equitable schools.

What this scenario about girls in crisis allows is the possibility of rescue by an attentive adult, usually one in the "helping professions." In the afterward of School

Girls, the writer notes that the book leaves the girls in the eight grade, in the "middle of the adolescent free-fall in self-esteem from which some will never recover. Others, however, will emerge from adolescence strengthened—empowered, perhaps, by a parent, a mentor, or an instructor like Judy Logan who puts equity at the center of her

“ Ibid., 74. ” Brown's theorization of contemporary identity politics echoes the struggles faced by individuals recovering from trauma. The adult survivor of childhood trauma, for instance, may create what Judith Herman calls a "fantasy of compensation” in which the subject hopes for an apology or a victory over her abuser. While the subject seeks redress in the name of empowerment, she remains tied to the perpetrator and opens herself up to the possibility of further humiliation since claims made by the survivor are often denied by the perpetrator, who argues that they themselves are being unfairly victimized. For more information see, Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (New York: Basic Books, 1992). 18 classroom and teaches about gender 'one stitch at a time.’"^° Similarly, in Voices o f the

H eart, Maureen Barberi notes that girls "need particular, informed understanding,

special but more honest nurturing from their female teacher, lest their voices get lost in

the chaos of conforming to unreal expectations in a world that does not value

intimacy."^' The adult's role as "savior" relies on the figure of the helpless girl; and so,

lessons of empowerment are paradoxically infused with psychic material through which

old traumas or wounds resurface and are projected onto the girl.

The girl offers a means through which to revisit past harm and a way to

reinterpret that injury by creating a rescue fantasy. It may be that the positing of a

wounded girl allows women the fantasy of self-rescue, but in a displaced mode as the

focus falls less on a searching inquiry into their own pasts, than an agenda of action on

behalf of a figure whose full meaning is imperfectly understood. Perhaps surprisingly,

this scenario resembles a familiar fairy tale script: adult women, teachers, mothers,

sympathetic listeners insert themselves as the prince who rescues the girl from harm

(which in this case is womanhood). It is important to point out that there is no "real" girl here; rather, she exists in the register of memory as an object of personal and collective mourning, a lost object that is impossible to retrieve. To the extent that feminist educational studies are rooted in contemporary identity politics, they suffer from the same melancholic attachments to past harm. In the next section I demonstrate how interventions into schooling that make claims on behalf of a "girl" explicitly or implicitly engage with this figure of a harmed child.

DeFazio in Orenstein, SchoolGirls, 276. Maureen Barberi, Sounds O f The Heart: Learning to Listen to Girls, with a forward by 19 "But damage has been done to my voice," I said sadly, "and I'm not sure it can be put

right. If you grow up eating peas and chicken breasts you can't possibly have an

interesting voice. There's no nourishment in it."

Marcia Aldrich, Girl Rearing

The girl often arises in educational discourse as a person who has been

marginalized or, to use more familiar parlance, "silenced" by the school and its practices

because of her sex. In this way private experience presumably might be politicized and

the silenced ought to demand the rights of good they have been denied. The authors of

Beyond Silenced Voices capture this perspective when they write that marginalized

voices "need to be heard and centered—if we are serious about schools as a democratic

public sphere, if we are sincere in our commitment to multicultural and feminist

education, and if we want to understand and interrupt the perversions and pleasures of

power, privilege, and marginalization in public schooling. This idea of voice was particularly salient in the 1990s.^^ Speaking up becomes both a means and a feminist metaphor for validating girls' potential. Gilligan, for instance, suggests that adult woman might reclaim the authentic voices that they learned to silence during adolescence in order to survive patriarchy. Here, the idea of past harm is central to the idea that students have "lost" something. This language of loss and recovery suggests

Myra Sadker (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1995), 8. “ Michelle Fine and Lois Weis, eds. Beyond Silenced Voices: Class, Race and Gender in United States Schools (New York; SUNY, 1993), 2. ^ For a review of recent “voice” books see Joan Jacobs Brumberg, “When Girls Talk: What It Reveals About Them and Us,” The Chronicle o f Higher Education (November 24, 2000) : B7-10.

20 that it isn't really the girl who animates these energies, but rather the girl as a psychic

substratum.

In her memoir Girl Rearing, Marcia Aldrich "finds" her voice in the women's

bathroom. She writes; "Some potential was secreted away in my voice. It was not my

skin, which could never come off. It came from deep inside me and pooled at the back

of my mouth. My voice came as a surprise, deeper, richer, more certain, even

powerful."^ However, when she returns to the dinner table, her "voice" is interrupted by

her mother's lessons in table manners. What Aldrich points to here is how one might

"feel" empowered but lack any real political clout. Aldrich's mother tells her daughter:

"You may think you are a citizen of the world, but get used to the powder room."^^

Similarly, the school girl may feel comfortable enough to voice her opinion and her self-esteem may improve as a result; however, she has no more political power than she did before. She is not a legal subject if only in the narrow legal sense that she is a minor. Furthermore, the use of voice as a gauge for a girl’s self-esteem is based on white middle-class notions of femininity. As bell hooks writes in her memoir Bone

Black “An outspoken girl might still feel that she was worthless because her skin was not light enough or her hair the right texture.”^®

But perhaps more troubling for the programs of feminist curriculum reform, some more scrutiny will need to be given before we can, with confidence, assert that girls could achieve "empowerment" within the confines of compulsory schooling. What is more obvious is that the girl learns that she needs adult protection in order to be empowered, a lesson that prepares her for future American citizenship as a "free"

^ Aldrich, Girl Rearing, 81. Ibid., 61. 21 heterosexual woman.^’ The trouble here is that she leams a lesson of vulnerability

through feminist education in order to learn the empowerment message. The wounded

girl is often silent, in part, because the adult is always speaking for her.

I am not leveling the power imbalance between men and women, but positioning

the "voice" projects in the milieu of the school and the pedagogies that articulate them.

I am not denying that the work of multicultural and feminist scholars and teachers is

important. This work has, among other things, made the "hidden curriculum" of

schooling visible through investigations into the ways in which schools perpetuate gendered, raced and class-biases. Nor am I devaluing the strategies of inclusive curriculum or practices such as "culturally-sensitive" teaching in which teachers draw on and build from the positive cultural differences children bring to school. What I want to point out here is the double-bind that occurs when we make identity claims that ultimately re-subordinate subjects using the very categories—African American, queer, girl—that the school has traditionally used to exclude people from the institution of public education. Finally, the presumed link between voice and empowerment implies that the "personal" is somehow unconnected from the institutions which make it possible. The notion that women's, or, in this case, girls', voices are true reflections of something called experience ignores how gender as an identity category in invented.

In her coming-of-age memoir. Girl Rearing , Marcia Aldrich tells a tale from school. "In tenth grad I flunked Home Economics" (104). Aldrich's assignment in class is to create an A-line dress. While the other female students follow the pattern and

hooks. Bone, xiii. ^ Lauren Berlant offers an engaging discussion of the adolescent girl as symbol of "infantile citizenship,” in The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997). 22 finish the dress, Aldrich struggles to install her zipper. She writes: " I remembered the

boys, who were building model boats in wood shop, boats to survive the squalls. I

resolved to give it a third, heroic try" (106). Unable to complete the assignment at

school Aldrich brings the dress home to her mother, who is unable to assist. The night

before Aldrich returns to Ms. Needlebaum's class with her unfinished dress she writes:

"I now knew that something awful and humiliating was going to happen. I thought no

longer about pumping the pedal that moved the needle. I thought that all over the world

there would always be sewing machines and young girls learning to follow yellowed

patterns. I would not be counted among them. While the other girls modeled their A-

line dresses, I could wear my sack in penance or go naked" (109). When she returns to

school, Aldrich's failure is displayed in front of the entire class. "Pointing to the place

where the zipper should have been. Miss Needlebaum chants, "What will become of

her, what will become of her?" (109). Interestingly, Aldrich doesn't argue that her

troubles are the result of a lack of opportunity to craft a boat; rather, she suggests that

the boys too were confronted with equally irrelevant and gendered tasks. Aldrich focuses less on a repressive lesson about femininity than on how the school, through tactics such as humiliation and conformity, are invested in regulating and normalizing students.

Aldrich's sackcloth resembles the dunce's cap. It serves as an emblem of her personal failure and a visible reminder of the necessity and purpose of schooling—the dunce can always leam. Through her representation of a sewing assignment, Aldrich stitches another lesson for the reader and makes visible how the school functions as a

23 disciplinary institution interested in creating healthy, law-abiding, heterosexual citizens.

In this way, she upholds Foucault's notion that individuality is produced by how one

differs from the "norm;" and visibly demonstrates that the school is one of the primary

sites in which bodies are regulated through the inculcation of gendered competencies

which train and discipline the body until an "identity" is etched below the surface. As

Foucault points out: "A relation of surveillance, defined and regulated, is inscribed at

the heart of the practice of teaching, not as an additional or adjacent part, but as a

mechanism that is inherent to it and which increases its efficiency."^®

The efforts to make curriculum and teaching practices the site of political activity masks the school's power to injure through its practices. Curriculum reform is always tainted by the school's investments as it emerges through a channel of power: approved by the district, developed by a set of experts who observe, interview, and test subjects to measure the curriculum's effectiveness. In this way the institution of schooling remains in place as a neutral site rather than as a disciplinary one invested with the power to create "docile bodies," to normalize the raced, classed and sexed bodies that are required by law to attend school. Focusing on curriculum and teaching strategies as the remedy requires that the school, a political place, be construed for the purposes of reform as a place in which a trans-historical "student" is exposed to some

"good" or "bad" curriculum and where she may experience a "good" or "bad" teacher, and reform tries to tilt the experiences toward the "good." Reconstituted in this way, political reform ironically de-politicizes schools as an institution and presents us, instead, with individuals, particular sites and specific curriculum to change. This is the

' Foucault, Discipline, 176.

24 sunny side of compulsory schooling that blinds us to the ways in which the lessons that

mark or celebrate difference are also the pedagogies that will regulate and school

subjects. For instance, in order to claim the identity of girl, the subject paradoxically

fixes herself as “other” to the school’s educative project. It may be that a "hidden

curriculum" arises out of the very tactics we use to "empower" girls. By attempting to

hold the girl still, suspended in time between pre-gendered little girlhood and heterosexual womanhood, we pass on our own psychic wounds and in turn school the

girl in a pedagogy of injury.

The books I have focused on in this discussion represent one sliver of the work on girls in schools; however, they are often the texts referenced in public debates about education in such a way that education is not confined to schools. Let me provide an example. In June 2000,The Atlantic Monthly published an excerpt drawn from conservative anti-feminist Christina Hoff Sommers' book The War Against Boys.^^

Sommers does not mount her criticism of feminist interventions in academic journals; rather, Sommers engages with the popular construction of the girl as a wounded victim that researchers made the center of educational reform in the 1990s. In particular,

Sommers cites, and dismisses, the work of Carol Gilligan, Myra and David Sadker,

Mary Pipher, and the researchers who contributed to the AAUW study. The cover of the magazine features a smiling Anglo-American schoolgirl raising her hand, eager to participate in the classroom while in the comer a smaller boy sulks behind her with arms crossed. For Sommers, this assertive girl symbolizes overzealous feminists who

Christina Hoff Sommers, "The War Against Boys" The Atlantic Monthly (May 2CXX)): 59-74.

25 have privileged the girl in a way that threatens to take away the rights of the American

school-boy.

Sommers' basic argument is that schools do not "short-change" girls through

unfair schooling practices: "The idea that schools and society grind girls down has

given rise to an array of laws and policies intended to curtail the advantage boys have and to redress the harm done to girls. That girls are treated as the second sex in school and consequently suffer, that boys are accorded privileges and consequently benefit— these are things everyone is presumed to know. But they are not true.'"*® The figure of the "girl in crisis" and the politics of injury that make her possible, open the door for

Sommers, who uses the language of harm to advocate for a new invention, the "boy in crisis." Sommers co-opts the feminist argument while at the same time takes the feminist analysis of gender and power out of it. She attempts to make a "reverse discrimination" argument (if its pro-girl it must be anti-boy) that plays on a backlash against feminism as well as an ethical concern for children. Sommers removes gender hierarchy from the analysis and fails to see the different constructions of boys and girls throughout the culture (not just in schools). Even if Sommers finds some schooling practices to privilege some girls and deduces prematurely that the focus on girls necessarily disadvantages boys, she doesn’t sufficiently situate those schooling practices within the broader range of cultural pedagogies. This example illustrates the bind Wendy Brown points out in her critique of contemporary identity politics: attempts to remedy past injury through a wounded identity ultimately re-inscribe the harm that the subject sought to overcome. Here, the "girl in crisis" is dethroned and publicly

Ibid.. 60.

2 6 humiliated by Sommers, who uses her as a key figure in her attempt to undermine a

decade of work by feminist educators and scholars.

Carol Gilligan and others responded publicly to Sommers' attack in a later issue

of The Atlantic Monthly!*' In general, Gilligan and her colleagues point out how boys

and girls are both victimized by the school in different ways. While I am in no way

siding with Sommers, I do want to point out how this debate is confined within a

heterosexual bind. Each group argues that children deserves the "right" education for

their particular sex. This usually takes the form of curriculum that attempts to remedy

stereotypes. For example, teachers might encourage boys to read more fiction, or create

a "math for girls" club. While somewhat helpful interventions, these tactics rely on and

continue to produce the cultural fiction that students arrive at school already hard-wired as boys or girls. Curricular interventions based on "differences" between the sexes are ultimately conservative in that rebellion and conformity are scripted within the matrix of normative heterosexual masculinity or femininity. When young women or girls actually exceed the boundaries of normative femininity, when Barbie arises as an object of same-sex desire rather than a passing fancy or when the tomboy fails to marry another set of worries arise. The girl who prefers boys' games and clothes can then be referred to a psychiatrist who after consulting the DSM IV might diagnosis her with a

"gender identity disorder." It may be that pedagogies offered in the school are less concerned with the girl's mathematical performance than with her ability to master heterosexual femininity.'*^

Carol Gilligan, et al., "Letters: Carol Gilligan et al. Versus Christina Hoff Sommers," The Atlantic Monthly (August 2000) : 6-12. For first person narratives that counter the notion of GID see Matthew Rottnek, ed.. Sissies and Tomboys; Gender Nonconformity and Homosexual Childhood (New York: New York University 27 The story of what happened, or what did not happen but should have—that story can

become a curtain drawn shut, a piece of insulation, a disguise, a razor, a tool that

changes every time it is used and sometimes becomes something other than we

intended. The story becomes the thing needed.

Dorothy Allison Two Or Three Things I Know For Sure

Suffering is said to educate the heart.

Marcia Aldrich Girl Rearing

As the girlhood wave swept onto the cultural shore another crested in the form of memoir."*^ Girlhood memoirs popped up everywhere, from Dorothy Allison's Two or

Three Things I Know For Sure to bell hooks' Bone Black.^ At first glance women's memoir may seem a strange place to arrive after a discussion of girls and schooling. To be sure women's memoirs are neither child-rearing texts, nor text books in any traditional sense. However, if we consider the ways in which personal narrative informs books such as Reviving Ophelia and School Girls, or the focus on capturing girls' "voices" as residue of a psychic harm in the past improperly understood or partially understood, the move to memoir is less a break than a deliberate step to make

Press, 1999). For an examination of how Transgendered childhood is represented in children's literature see, Judy Norton, "Transchildren and the Discipline of Children's Literature," The lio n and The Unicorn, 23 (1999): 415-436. Gilmore provides a backdrop to the memoir boom in Trauma and Testimony. Dorothy Allison, Two or Three Things I Know For Sure. New York: Penguin, 1995); bell hooks. Bone Black: Memories o f Girlhood (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1996).

28 visible the underlying terrain. Given that the child is central to how identity is theorized

in late-twentieth century America, the representation of the girl, whether or not she is

explicitly meant to represent the self, always engages with “cultural pedagogies,” a

term I use to refer to the cultural materials and practices that are aimed at gendering the child's body and identity into two disparate heterosexual categories. Similarly, as

Gilmore has suggested, given that women's memoirs are autobiographical their narratives are always linked to larger discourses about identity and truth. In this way, women's memoirs are central to contemporary representations of girlhood, and to the potential transformations of feminist understandings of the stakes it raises when it plays for the girl.

Women's memoirs are self-reflective and highly constructed representations of the self that engage with and draw on conventions of fiction and incorporate other cultural materials. That is, memoirs represent explicit and conscious efforts to reconstruct the sorts of experiences and influences that surface obliquely in the girls in crisis books. Memoirs are a hybrid genre in which history, personal narrative and cultural critique converge. Leigh Gilmore writes that "texts perform a complex kind of cultural work—never more so than when they seek to represent the 'self This cultural work involves reconciling a mass of competing cultural materials. Writing a memoir offers an occasion to confront and organize these materials, to provide a social context for them and the author's perspective. The self-conscious reflections by adult women on girlhood cultural pedagogies that train offer an alternative archive for feminist reflection of girls and schools.

Gilmore, Trauma, 22. 29 Through projects of self-representation, women negotiate the personal and

collective pedagogies about girl-rearing and engage in provocative ways that exceed

the materials and paradigms traditionally used when theorizing girlhood in Education.

Given all the attention to girls and schools, it is perhaps surprising that the memoirs I

analyze here rarely mention formal schooling. The women's coming-of-age memoirs

analyzed in this project invert familiar storylines and materials often dismissed in the

school as harmful curricula. Like fairy tales or popular fictions like Nancy Drew,

women's memoirs are "inappropriate" curricular materials. They introduce complex

messages about gender and violence, gender and power gender and fantasy that exceed

the traditional scope of school curriculum.

Marcia Aldrich's memoir Girl Rearing begins with the statement: "I was bom in

an alley." Aldrich's inauspicious beginning suggests that this girlhood story will require off-road equipment. She writes: "But maybe an alley is just as off-route to the same place, a slow secret that leads where the main thoroughfare directs. Or maybe it goes someplace wholly new and unknown, or goes nowhere. What grows in the alley is unplanned, a darkness of blackberry thickets banked along the rim, coarse summer flowers that grow like weeds, smells potent as gasoline, stalks furrowed in dung, tufts of pickerel weed, the havoc of division, horsetails, and dust. And the alley is in me"'^

Aldrich constructs a girl who refuses to "think pink" a figure not made up of sugar and spice but one of dung and coarse weeds. Alleys rarely appear on maps and may as likely end abruptly in someone's concrete driveway as return the traveler to a main street. Like the alley itself, Aldrich's girlhood is hard to locate on a map.

Aldrich, Girl Rearing, 14.

30 I cite this excerpt because it challenges the idea that the child is somehow

unhinged from culture until gender appears on the body and influences the adult's

identity. Aldrich moves identity away from her sexed body toward the psychic material

that frames her coming of age, such as her feelings of displacement, of an identity that

refuses to be domesticated. The alley is in her, in ways that she can never fully

articulate. Like Aldrich the authors I analyze here refuse the possibility of constructing

a representative girl.

As Gilmore has argued, women often return to traumatic material in their memoirs, and in doing so, confront the insufficiency of conventional scripts to express it. Sometimes they rely on metaphor to turn language in the service of what it seems so hard to say. Lauren Slater uses the metaphor of epilepsy, of fits and starts, "to express subtleties, and horrors and gaps in my past for which I have never been able to find the words.While the women memoirists I analyze here rarely mention the lessons they learned in school, they often evoke the metaphor of education to talk about growing up, and learning to be sexed, and as a way to engage with traumatic curricula that exceeds the boundaries of school. For example, Susanna Kaysen's extra-curricular activities in high-school involve sleeping with her high-school English teacher. After graduation she attends a mental institution instead of a college. Kathryn Harrison refers to her time spent in her father's house as "some kind of punitive school—which, in a way, it is; I'll remember my time with him as filled with painful lessons.""*® Because memoirs are projects based in memory, and deal with traumatic material, it is difficult to make a

Slater, Lying, 219-220. ^ Harrison, Kiss, 176.

31 direct link between the pedagogy offered and the lesson learned, between what actually

happened and the writer's reconstruction.

Dorothy Allison, for instance, begins her memoir with what she doesn't know.

She writes: "I am here to claim everything I know, and there are only two or three

things I know for sure"(52). Allison's coming-of-age does not follow the prescribed

developmental path, and the lessons she leams are not age-appropriate. She writes:

"Two or three things I know for sure, but none of them is why a man would rape a

child, why a man would beat a child" (43). Allison leams that she is a "second class citizen," not through a curriculum in which strong women were absent, but through a pedagogy within the home. Allison has a caring teacher, and strong female role models, but it doesn't offset the systematic, sexist violence Daddy Glen represents. Allison points out the violent aspects of her education, resisting the notion that the leamer is invited into an educative relationship by a caring adult. "How does it come together, the sweaty power of violence, the sweet taste of desire held close? It rises in the simplest way, naturally and easily, when you're so young you don't know what's coming, before you know why you're not supposed to talk about it" (46). Allison is interested in subject matter that the school cannot acknowledge, and knowledge that young girls are not supposed to have and lessons leamt that adult women are not supposed to talk about in public.

There is a constant struggle here between what the culture authorizes these women to know and what they have experienced. Allison writes: "Two or three things

I know, but this is the one I am not supposed to talk about, how it comes together—sex and violence, love and hatred. I'm not ever supposed to put together the two halves of

32 my life—the man who walked across my childhood and the life I have made for myself.

I am not supposed to talk about hating that man when I grew up to be a lesbian, a dyke,

stubborn, competitive, and perversely lustful" (45). Here Allison challenges the

boundaries of the adult/child binary through her reference to traumatic pedagogical

material that remains integral to her life as an adult woman. Through their use of

memory, Allison and other women memoirists insist that girlhood is less a time-bound

developmental state than it is a complicated psychic space that girls are compelled to

occupy through various gendered lessons.

Unlike the narratives presented in SchoolGirls or Reviving Ophelia, there are no saviors in these tales. These are women who attempt to save themselves by writing about falls from grace, about suicide attempts, and about sexual violence. Parents resemble fairy tale characters, they are rapacious, absent, or helpless. For these memoirists like the women who write books about girls, girlhood is over, lost; however, they do not turn back to the very institutions such as the school or the family that colluded in injuring them, or to clinical psychologists who will pack them off to mental institutions. Dorothy Allison and others suggest that there wasn't one book, one curriculum that changed them, nor do they suggest one might exist. Rather, they reconstruct their traumatic memories in an effort to reclaim themselves on their own terms. Feminist psychologist, Judith Herman points out that one of the strategies for overcoming trauma requires the person to immerse themselves "in a past experience of frozen time." Through memoir, women animate rather than freeze past injuries in place, and in this way the past becomes "a part of the survivor's experience, but only one part

33 of it.""*® Women memoirists move girl's education into a psychic register, and offer lessons in abandonment, betrayal, sexual abuse and madness.

The basic premise of this project is that women memoirists craft the lessons of girlhood into a school that exceeds any particular, named institution. This study, then, requires that I venture into the schoolyard, around backs of buildings, where women memoirists offer alternative pedagogies that blur the line between adulthood and childhood, and tutor us about the insufficiency of the time-bound and gendered identities that the school imposes, and finally disperse the work of "pedagogy" throughout the culture.

’ Herman, Trauma, 195.

34 CHAPTER 2

RED, WHITE AND DREW: THE ALL-AMERICAN GIRL AND THE CASE OF

GENDERED CHILHOOD

Nancy Drew was more liberated than girls had dared imagine-as free and self- possessed as any adult. With her success, the amateur girl detective became the staple heroine, and it was a magical role if there ever was one.

Bobbi Ann Mason

In 1991 Applewood Press issued facsimile editions of the original Nancy Drew

Mysteries. Nancy Drew made her first appearance in 1930 and in 1959 the series was updated: the publisher removed stereotypical representations; Nancy aged from sixteen to eighteen so that she could drive legally in all states; and, she also received a makeover that made her less bold, more in tune with 1950s expectations of normative femininity.' Applewood's facsimile editions bring back the independent and assertive

Nancy Drew of the 1930s (as well as the derogatory images of racial and class

"others"). The reproductions feature original illustrations, and are introduced by women

* * I limit my analysis to the original Nancy Drew series rather than later editions because the "assertive" Nancy is the character adult women remember from their post-war girlhoods. The history of the series has been covered in depth elsewhere. For more information see Carol Billman, The Secret o f the Stratemeyer Syndicate (New York: Ungar Publishing Company, 1986). 35 such as mystery writer Nancy Pickford and novelist Jane Smiley, who both write about

how Nancy Drew influenced them as young girls. Applewood's marketing strategy

relies on selling the replicas as both a collective American phenomenon, "These books

are a part of our heritage," and as a personal girlhood experience. A golden seal on the book reads: "The originals just as you remember them."

As the reissue of these books suggests, Nancy Drew remains one of America's most famous, and infamous, adolescent heroines. Children's literature historian Anne

MacLeod points out in her article "Nancy Drew and Her Rivals: No Contest", that the

Nancy Drew mysteries are one of the longest running children's series.' The mysteries have been popular reading material for young girls (aged eight to eleven years old) since the first three titles appeared in 1930. By 1993 over eighty-million copies of

Nancy's adventures had sold, allowing one critic to conclude that "reading Nancy Drew was a pivotal childhood experience for millions of girls.Nancy Drew's contemporary appeal is evident: Applewood's facsimile version of Nancy’s Mysterious Letter appeared on the Los Angeles Times' June 2000 "Children's Best Seller List" alongside

Newbery winner Holes, and Nancy Drew consistently surfaces in popular cultural sources.^ She has been hailed as an adolescent Dana Scully of X-Files fame and as one of the first riot grrrls. Similarly, articles about Nancy Drew have appeared in academic journals such as the Lion and the Unicorn and The Journal o f Popular Culture as well

‘ Anne MacLeod, American Childhood: Essays on Children's Literature of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Athens: University of Georgia, 1994). ^ Carolyn Stewart Dyer, "The Nancy Drew Phenomenon: Rediscovering Nancy Drew" in Rediscovering Nancy Drew edited by Carolyn Stewart Dyer and Nancy Tillman Romalov (Iowa City: University of Iowa, 1995), 2.

36 as more "mainstream" publications ranging from The Wall Street Journal to Playboy.'*

To say that Nancy Drew is an intriguing character would be to understate her appeal as

girlhood superheroine.

Nancy Drew appears in different guises in different time periods. In the mid­

seventies Pamela Sue Martin appeared in the televised version of the Nancy Drew

mysteries.^ In the late '80s, a spin-off series written for an older audience appeared

called "The Nancy Drew Files." Most recently, Nancy Drew solves mysteries in a CD

Rom game developed by Her Interactive. The many iterations of Nancy Drew suggest

she is less a personality than a sort of cultural paper doll who can be cloaked in a variety

of gendered pedagogies so that she might fit a particular historical moment and its ideas

about American girlhood.

Nancy Drew's adaptability may be part of why she has remained popular with

young female readers regardless of the attempts of librarians, teachers and other adults

to dismiss the series for its far-fetched plots and shoddy writing.® The improbable

storylines and the lack of literary quality in the series seems to have been less important

^ Carolyn Keene (pseudonym) Nancy's Mysterious Letter (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1932); "Books For Kids." Los Angeles Times (June 11,2000): 6; Louis Sachar, Holes (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998). The Lion And The Unicorn dedicated an entire issue to Nancy Drew, The Uon and the Unicorn 18 (1994). James Jones, "Nancy Drew, WASP Super Girl of the 1930s." Journal o f Popular Culture 6 (1973): 707-17, Lee Zacharias, "Nancy Drew, Ballbuster." Journal Of Popular Culture 4 {\976): 1027- 1038. * In the late 1970s "The Nancy Drew Mysteries" were adapted into a weekly television series starring Pamela Sue Martin. In July 1978 Pamela Sue Martin appeared on and under the covers of Playboy Magazine in an article entitled: "Nancy Drew Grows Up." Richard Warren Lewis, "Nancy Drew Grows Up," Playboy (July 1978): 88. Martin stated in her Playboy interview that she was tired of being considered as "bland as a glass of milk. " Through her appearance in Playboy she attempted to shift her image away from the dull Nancy Drew, who never showed any " sign that she would indulge with the opposite sex.” ® The Nancy Drew series has been critiqued by educators and librarians since its inception. See, Esther Green Bierbaum, "Bad Books in Series: Nancy Drew in the Public Library." The Lion and the Unicorn 18 (1994) : 92-102. 37 to young readers than its fantasy elements. As Barbara Walters remembers: "Seems to

me I read all of them. It was escape. When you had some time to yourself you could

curl up in a chair in a comer with Nancy Drew."’ The long-lasting popularity of these

stories and the recurrent appearance of Nancy Drew in different generations invites an

analysis of the series as a compelling form of American girl-rearing.

Cultural studies scholars have taught us that the relationship between popular

literature and its readers is a complex one. For instance, in her landmark book Reading

the Romance, Janice Radway pointed out that women actively engaged with rather than

passively accepted the normative messages about heterosexual romance in adult pulp fiction.® Similarly, scholars such as Meredith Cherland, and Linda Christian-Smith

have investigated how young girls' understanding of themselves as gendered subjects intersects with personal interpretations and the social practices that structure the readings of popular texts.^ In general, Cherland and others found that through popular literature young readers engage in complex ways with the constructions of gender.

Additionally, girls actively produce girlhood through their interpretations and preferences. Take for instance the "girl power" movement that has now been incorporated into mainstream girls' magazines such as Seventeen or Girls' LifeJ°

’ Elisabeth Bumille, "Squeaky-Clean and Still Eighteen: Nancy Drew, Girl Detective, Marks Half a Century," The Washington Post (April 17,1980) : 3. ® Janice Radway, Reading The Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature, rev. ed.. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984. ® Meredith Cherland, Private Practices: Girls Reading Fiction and Constructing Identity (Philadelphia: Taylor and Francis, 1994); Linda Christian Smith, ed. Texts of Desire: Essays on Fiction, Femininity and Schooling (Washington DC: Palmer, 1990). " For more information about girls as active producers of culture see Angela McRobbie, Postmodernism and Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994).

38 The representation of American girlhood in the Nancy Drew series is equally

complex, and readers have interpreted Nancy in a variety of ways ranging from white

supremacist to Ball-Buster to feminist role-model. The series is held together through

an assortment of puzzling lessons, a gendered curricula that attempts, and ultimately

fails, to reduce the All-American girl to a slim, white, middle-class, and heterosexual

body. This is not to suggests that there is one lesson about gender in the texts, nor that

women all read the series in the same way. Kathleen Chamberlain points out that

"Nancy Drew is a powerful cultural icon because of, not despite, the paradoxical nature

of the lessons she teaches."" There is no one-to-one correspondence between the

cultural pedagogies within the Nancy Drew series and how those lessons are

interpreted. For instance, representations of gender are tied in a variety of ways to

constructions of race, class and sexuality, underscoring how each or some combination

of these variables is available or not available for analysis by Nancy's readers. As women memoirists make clear, girlhood pedagogies are negotiated by readers and authors alike through lived experiences, their imaginations and the cultural materials available to them.

Nancy Drew is not a weird blip on an otherwise empty cultural screen; rather, she exemplifies how cultural pedagogies like popular fiction produce girlhood. Nancy

Drew figures prominently in narratives of female coming-of-age in part because the series captures our anxieties and fantasies about American girlhood, and more particularly our cultural fears about adolescent female sexuality. I am less interested in

" Kathleen Chamberlain, "The Secrets of Nancy Drew: Having Their Cake and Eating It Too." Hie Uon and the Unicorn 18 (1994), 2. 39 Nancy as an example of a certain type of girl, a tom-boy for instance, than I am in the

lessons that teach the reader about Nancy's gender, and how those gendered pedagogies

intersect with "common sense" assumptions about class, race, and sexuality. In this chapter, we spring into Nancy Drew's blue roadster for a road trip through the sometimes contradictory pedagogies that circulate around the invention of American adolescent girlhood. The road map in the glove compartment is only a partial itinerary that in no way covers the entire territory of girlhood nor the numerous routes one might take to understand the books. Our first excursion begins with an examination of how the denial and displacement of Nancy's imagined (hetero) sexuality is consistently maintained through the absence of her pubescent body.

Silence itself- the things one declines to say, or is forbidden to name, the discretion that is required between different speakers-is less the absolute limit of discourse, the other side from which it is separated by a strict boundary, than an element that functions alongside the things said, with them and in relation to them within over-all strategies.

Michel Foucault, The History o f Sexuality

One can only hypothesize what Nancy Drew might have included in a memoir of her girlhood—tales of near-misses in the blue roadster, fashion tips for those poorly- clad villains, and perhaps some inside information about a case or two. If Nancy is as preoccupied with solving mysteries as her adventure stories suggest, then her girlhood memoir might differ from the stories contemporary women tell: Nancy suffers no eating disorders, nor is she institutionalized in a psychiatric hospital because of compulsive

40 promiscuity. Nancy doesn't suffer from an Electra complex, and her father, Carson

Drew, is attentive but not in a rapacious sort of way. The reader who hoped to be

titillated by Nancy's exploits with Ned—such as the news reporter from The Columbus

Dispatch who fantasized about Ned tying Nancy up with his sock garters— would be

sorely disappointed.'^ Nancy never has to fear being labeled a slut for going all the

way, nor pass a sleepless night worrying about an out-of-wedlock pregnancy. Through the representation of Nancy Drew's body the text seeks to deny the possibility of Nancy

Drew's sexuality. For instance, the physical changes we often associate with female adolescence—developing breasts, widening hips— are curiously absent from the Nancy

Drew mysteries. Let's just say, Nancy never misses a sleuthing gig because of menstrual cramps.

This silence is compelling when juxtaposed with the content of contemporary

American women's memoirs, such as Dorothy Allison's Two or Three Things I Know for Sure, Kathryn Harrison's The Kiss, Maya Angelou's / Know Why the Caged Bird

Sings where the girl's body and her (sometimes violent) education in (hetero) sex are central themes. Women focus in different ways on how their status as children (or young girls) became disrupted by the knowledge that they inhabited bodies that were sexed. In her memoir, Girl-Rearing, Marcia Aldrich writes: "We are bom into circumstances whose history we cannot compute; nonetheless, we absorb them, embody them, in a skin we can never completely shed."'^ Aldrich articulates how her own history, the circumstances and lessons of her girlhood, permeates her body. Women

Mike Harden, "It's No Mystery: Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys Candy For The Brain," The Columbus Dispatch (Oct. 26, 1998): IE. Aldrich, Girl Rearing, 19. 41 memoirists rely on the body as a way to represent how they came to understand

themselves as "girls." The reflections of women looking back on their girlhoods map

onto the often reluctant transition between girlhood and womanhood portrayed in

American women's fiction, where heroines most often oscillate between girlhood and

adulthood, " struggling for adult status and resisting becoming a woman."''' This image

symbolizes an idea about girlhood that will appear in the memoirs I examine later.

Girlhood is less passage with a clear "from here to there" than a sort of stuck in the door

period.

The Nancy Drew mysteries never really stage Nancy's transition into

womanhood; rather, as Kathleen Chamberlain argues, the super-sleuth is always in a

state of becoming: "the liminal state that Nancy offers is comfortable because it is both

X and Y—child and adult."The constant deferral of Nancy's coming-of-age allows her

to remain a pre-pubescent girl who inhabits a body that resembles the more gender- neutral category of child (or unmarked category of boy). And yet, while Nancy Drew

seems immune to the gender-based concerns women novelists and memoirists lay out, the series is always addressing Nancy's potential sexuality. The series goes to great pains to avoid the topic of female adolescent sexuality by underscoring Nancy's disinterest in sex.

Barbara White, Growing up Female: Adolescent girlhood in American Fiction (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1985), 88. In her comprehensive study of female adolescence in women's fiction Barbara White concludes that the majority of novels written by women from 1920 to 1982 "include scenes of male sexual harassment or violence; at best the heroine encounters a man who exposes himself and at worst she or one of her friends is beaten or raped " (175). Similarly, see Ruth Saxton, ed. The Girl: Constructions o f The Girl in Contemporary Fiction by Women (New York: St. Martin's Press,1998). Chamberlain, "Eating," 6. " Jacqueline Rose, The Case of Peter Pan or The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1984), 27. 42 This pedagogy of sexual innocence is not rare in children's literature. Feminist

psychoanalytic critic Jacqueline Rose points out that even when sexuality is repeatedly

denied in texts intended for children, it always remains a central concern of the genre.

She argues: “It is sexuality in the form of its repeated disavowal, a relentless return to

the question of origins and sexual difference which is focused time and again on the

child. The child is there, purely and simply, to bear the weight of that impossible

question.”*® Nancy Drew upholds Rose's hypothesis as her status as heterosexual female preoccupies the series. The various lessons that help make gendered childhood comprehensible are consistently aimed at and played out on Nancy's body. If as Susan

Bordo proposes the body and bodily practices exist "as a concrete arena where cultural fantasies and anxieties are played out." then the literary representation of Nancy Drew might allow a glimpse into the cultural fears and the desires associated with the adolescent female body.'^

I mean her friend George dressed like a boy and Bess was fat, so you didn't want to be her. Nancy had the car, Nancy had the boyfriend.

—Susan Brownmiller

The independence Nancy experiences in her adventures are made possible primarily through her asexual body and the mobility it allows. Nancy is taut, athletic

Susan Bordo, "The Body and The Reproduction of Femininity," in Writing on The Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory, edited by (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 21. '®LeoraTannenbaum, Slut!: Growing Up Female With a Bad Reputation (New York: HarperCollins, 2000). 43 and slim, some might even say "boyish," a beauty ideal popular in early twentieth

century America but also a figure that continues to emerge in particular historical

moments (Ally McBeal for example). Nancy's slenderness offers lessons about

adolescent female sexuality, and signals her (hetero)sexual restraint.

Thin bodies are often culturally coded as being under control. In Leora

Tannenbaum's recent book Slut! she finds that young women with curvaceous bodies

are often defined as "loose" regardless of their actual behavior; Monica Lewinsky's

weight, for instance, was essential in creating an image of her as sexually aggressive.'®

About the contrast between the representation of fat and skinny bodies in American pop-culture, Susan Bordo writes, "if the thin body represents a triumph over need and want, a stripping down to some clear, distinct essence of the self, fat represents just the opposite—the shame of being too present, too hungry, too overbearing, too needy, overflowing with ‘unsightly desire, simply "too much.' It is no surprise then that

Nancy Drew's side-kick Bess is fat as well as wimpy.

Nancy's appetite is never excessive, she doesn't splurge on numerous bowls of ice-cream. She eats on the run, a quick sandwich here, or a breakfast roll there. Even when jumping onto a moving train (one can only marvel that she doesn’t lose a pump), playing golf, or hiding in confined spaces, Nancy's body is usually under control.

Constantly engaged in self-regulation, Nancy marks the fleshy excess of the ordinary

American girl as deviant. She is, to use Foucault's terms, the ultimate "docile body."

Nancy's restraint is further emphasized through the representation of class or racial "Others". Many scholars have documented the disturbing stereotypical

44 representations of race and class in the Nancy Drew mystery series.^ Villains are easy

to spot in River Heights. Unsavory characters usually exhibit a bad fashion sense, and

inhabit raced and classed bodies. For the most part, one can predict that nasty culprits

will fail to share Nancy's WASP background. In The Hidden Staircase the reader

encounters an African American women who is described by Nancy's friend Rosemary

Tumball as "a colored woman who looks as though she was an ogre." Emphasis is

placed on the woman's body which is described as heavy-set and fat. Her extravagant

body reiterates the cultural myth about the licentious sexuality of African American

woman. Susan Bordo points out that bodies of different racial, ethnic or class

backgrounds often appear in American popular culture as "a certain disgusting excess—

of body, fervor, intensity—which needs to be restrained, trained, and in a word, made

more white. This distinction between Nancy's self-discipline and the untamed

"Others" she encounters is further emphasized through villains' physical locales.

Nancy Drew lives in River Heights, smack in the heart of the American mid­ west. Nancy and her friends reside in tranquil settings, in large houses with Martha

Stewart-like interiors. They usually have servants, or difficulty finding good help.

Nancy's tidy landscape is often juxtaposed with the wild landscapes of the villains. The distinct locales school the reader about race and class as well as gender. The undomesticated landscapes of the villains, like their excessive bodies signify their place

Bordo. "Reproduction," 130. “ For more information about the representation of race and class in the series see Donnarae MacCann, Njeri Fuller, and Dinah Eng, D. in Dyer & Romalov, Rediscovering.

Carolyn Keene [pseud.] The Hidden Staircase, with an introduction by Nancy Pickard (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1930; reprint, Bedford: Applewood 1991), 123. Bordo. Unbearable, 134. 45 in the social order and make Nancy's whiteness comprehensible. The geographical

layout of River Heights symbolizes how raced, classed and sexed bodies are organized

within the larger context of America's cultural landscape. Readers learn quickly that

"good" girls have tidy yards while bad ones leave their gardens unattended. Nancy's

moral superiority is represented through her body and her social locale. That is,

whiteness is not just about the color of Nancy's skin; rather, it is a reminder of her

sexual morality. By linking race with moral inferiority, the text attempts to keep racial

boundaries in place. The Nancy Drew series forecloses the idea that racial and class

disparity are the result of inequitable cultural practices, in order to emphasize the

"common sense" notion that inherent flaws, such as a lack of self-discipline justifies the

oppression of particular groups or individuals.

The text sets Nancy up, usually dressed in either red, white and/or blue, as the

ideal American girl. About her own reading of Nancy Drew as a young girl, Filipina

scholar Melinda de Jesds puts it this way; "In our aspirations for a feminist role model

in the girl sleuth, we were also forced to take in the cultural baggage of white

supremacy inherent in the series' depictions of American girlhood and its possibilities.

The valorization of whiteness often led to the denigration of negation of self and whole communities of color."^ de Jesds points out how the books' distorted representations of race are woven into a seemingly innocuous and pleasurable experience, and raises the question about who can be the American girl. Critiques such as de Jesds' point out that

Nancy Drew is in some ways emblematic of American imperialism. Nancy's roadster

^ Melinda de Jesds, "Fictions of Assimilation; Nancy Drew, Cultural Imperialism, and The Filipina/American Experience." In Delinquents and Debutantes: Twentieth-Century Girls' Cultures, edited by Sherri Inness. (New York: New York University, 1998), 249. 4 6 represents progress while her travels to "exotic" or "shabby" neighborhoods suggest

America's penchant for expansion into other nations. In this way Nancy Drew, and the

young girl in general, serve as a symbolic reminder of the nation's adolescence.

However, Nancy's travels also reveal a worry about class and racial others who

might infringe on white-middle class privilege, including but not limited to a growing class of economically-independent African Americans. Nancy's attempts to subdue bad characters and restore order by returning lost inheritances or jewels to "good", upstanding families may reflect a larger cultural fear about non-whites invading "good" neighborhoods or taking jobs away from deserving the white middle- and upper-middle classes. Travelling about in her blue roadster, Nancy Drew subdues unruly bodies, reiterating the superior rationality of the white middle classes, and protecting its daughters from pernicious influences.

Through Nancy's body and the deviant "Others" she encounters we leam the white middle-class daughter's "place" in the American landscape. Her slim figure doesn't take up too much space, she takes no money for her work, and usually only investigates cases that involve domestic disturbances and the restoration of lost fortunes. Nancy's perpetually girlish body may produce anxieties because no girl could ever achieve such perfection. At the same time, Nancy Drew allows for the fantasy of being safe in a girl’s body that is further defended by race and class privilege. Susan Bordo writes that idealized cultural images, or in this case literary representations, often "carry fantasized solutions to our anxieties and insecurities, and that's part of the reason they are

4 7 powerful."^ Nancy is safe in her father's home, helps male police officers to solve

crimes, and outwits sometimes violent (usually male) criminals. Nancy is knocked

unconscious no less than thirty times by a blow to the head, and manages to escape tiny

spaces such as cellars and boat cabins. Yet, Nancy's autonomy like her ability to slip

into small places requires that she first escape her own sexed body by regulating it.

As I have argued here, the containment of Nancy's imagined sexuality requires an acknowledgement of it, and sex is always between the covers of a Nancy Drew mystery. Nancy's sexual ignorance or disinterest is consistently undermined by

"awakenings" or "discoveries." For example. In The Hidden Staircase as the plot climaxes so does Nancy. In the following scene Nancy Drew leads a sheriff and his deputy to the Tumball mansion where she shows them the hidden staircase she has found. At the bottom of the staircase the group reaches what looks like a solid wall.

"Now what?" The sheriff demanded.

""Look for a brass ring or a tiny knob, " she directed the two men. Even as she whispered the instruction, her hand struck a solid object on the wall. Eagerly, she felt of it and discovered it was a small metal ring.

"I've found it!" she whispered in delight.

“ Bordo, “Reproduction,” 112. 48 She gave the ring a hard pull, and to the amazement of the sheriff and his

deputy, the secret panel opened.

While the men look on, Nancy discovers that "small metal ring" with (erotic) "delight".

The earlier lessons about the containment of sexuality are evident in this passage as

Nancy Drew, like the adolescent girl, is responsible for controlling her own as well as men's sexual urges. At the same time, a repressed anxiety about women's untapped sexual potential and their "discovery" of masturbation quakes on the surface of the text.

The men that surround Nancy Drew are inconsequential and Nancy's eager delight at finding a secret passage seems a trifle overzealous. As Foucault has pointed out, the history of sexuality is riddled with attempts to dissuade people from indulging in this

"private vice." That Nancy masturbates in front of the unsuspecting cops parallels the disavowal of Nancy's (hetero) sexuality in general. Not surprisingly, this results in latent material that surfaces in periodic awakenings and is also deflected onto her relationships with women.

Halfway through the window, she hesitated without knowing just why she did it.

Nervously, she glanced back over her shoulder. A queer sensation passed over her leaving her a trifle frightened.

Carolyn Keene, The Bungalow Mystery

One of the hallmarks of the early Nancy Drew books is her female-centered world: Carson Drew, Ned Nickerson, and a host of bad villains serve as a backdrop for

’ Keene, "Staircase," 189. 49 Nancy's adventures and her interactions with other women. This emphasis on female

relationships is provocative given that the Nancy Drew mystery series first appeared in

the 1930s, a decade in which fears about homosexuality caused a wide-spread social

panic. In 1929, for example, attempts were made in the U.S. to ban Radcylffe Hall's

lesbian coming of age novel. The Well o f Loneliness. ^ The highly publicized trial that

ensued brought lesbianism into public view and broke taboos about gender and

sexuality. The economic hardships of the Depression were blamed in part on

homosexuals, and the loosening of sexual mores in the late-nineteenth and early-

twentieth century that same-sex relationships signified. In her history of homosexuality

in the U.S., An American Obsession Jennifer Terry writes that "the backlash against

homosexuality during the 1930s was fueled, in a general sense, by social turmoil and

public anxiety stemming from the stock market crash and onset of the Great

Depression. The 1930s were a time of gender confusion in general. First wave feminism had disrupted previously-held assumptions about gender roles and opened up new opportunities, especially for middle-class white women. The single modem girl, who moved away from her parents to work or attend college had become a familiar figure around the turn of the century. The increased visibility of young unmarried women outside of the home resulted in attempts to regulate young women through their sexual behaviors. The "discovery" of and attempt to control adolescent female sexuality

"was reflected in the marked proliferation after 1920 of books and articles on the

“ Radclyffe Hall, The Well o f Loneliness ( New York: Covici Friede, 1928). For an in depth study of the connections between homosexual content in girls' series and the Well o f Loneliness see Rosemary Auchmuty’s landmark study of English girls’-school series books, A World o f Girls (London: The Women’s Press, 1992).

50 character and management of the adolescent girl."^ One management technique

involved defining unconventional young women as dangerous homosexuals. According

to feminist historian Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, young women who deviated from

"appropriate" behaviors were often accused of lesbianism. She writes: "By the 1920s,

charges of lesbianism had become a common way to discredit women professionals,

reformers and educators—and the feminist political, reform, and education institutions they founded. Plays appeared depicting the dangers of lesbianism in women's schools and colleges."^ These examples suggest that an anxiety about lesbianism was in the air when Nancy Drew arrived on the scene; and that this worry partially informed the inception and reception of the series. As literary scholar Nancy Tillman Romalov points out, "the creators of girls adventures stories engaged, whether knowingly or unwittingly, in strategies of social and sexual control by fictively containing protagonists' experiences and knowledge.

The cultural reconfiguration of heterosexual gender roles achieved after first wave feminism provides a subtext for Nancy Drew's adventures. Nancy's mother dies when she is three. Here, the absence of a maternal figure allows the daughter to embark on her adventures, and at the same time captures the disruption of the idea that women remain in the home. Nancy's father rather than her mother serves as the primary guide in gender socialization. In several of the early books Nancy Drew even carries her

Jennifer Terry, An American Obsession: Science, Medicine, and Homosexuality in Modern Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 268. “ Constance Nathanson, Dangerous Passage: The Social Control of Sexuality in Women's Adolescence (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991), 99.

Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions o f Gender in Victorian America (New York: Knopf, 1985), 281.

51 father's revolver, a symbol of her borrowed masculinity. However, Nancy never uses

the gun, an illustration of the unique bind of Nancy identity: she is both "powder puff

and twentieth century modem girl."^' The Nancy Drew mysteries deal with the anxiety

about female homosexuality by attempting to highlight her normative feminine

heterosexuality. The more Nancy's normative feminine heterosexuality is emphasized,

however, the more her heterosexual girlhood slips away. That is, in an attempt to

construct the "all-American girl," the Strateymeyer syndicate inadvertently created as exemplary lesbian.^^

In order to make Nancy's sexual innocence believable, the text consistently emphasizes Nancy's relationships with girls (Nancy's boyfriend, Ned Nickerson, doesn't appear until the seventh book in the series). The books are full of examples of female- focused relationships. For instance, at the end of The Bungalow Mystery Laura

Pendelton and Nancy stand arm in arm. The text reads: "The prospect of a restful summer with

Laura Pendelton and Helen Coming satisfied her completely."^^

As the series attempts to manage Nancy's (hetero) sexual innocence the teenage sleuth experiences a significant amount of gender trouble. In particular, Nancy

^ Nancy Tillman Romalov, "Lady and The Tramps: The Cultural Work of Gypsies in Nancy Drew and Her Foremothers." The Lion and the Unicorn 18 (1994), 31. For historical context of Nancy Drew series see Deborah Siegel, “Nancy Drew as New Girl Wonder: Solving it all for the 1930s” in Nancy Drew and Company edited by Sherrie Inness (Bowling Green: Bowling Green Popular Press, 1997). “ Nancy Drew has received quite a bit of attention as a femme lesbian heroine. See Sherri Inness ( 1997) and Julia Gardner (1998) for queer perspectives on Nancy Drew. Femme lesbian Nancy is the star of fiction writer Mabel Maney's (1993) humorous parody of the series. The Nancy Clueless and the Hardly Boys Mysteries. ^Carolyn Keene [pseud], r/teBMnga/owA^s/e/^ (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1930; reprint, Bedford: Applewood 1991), 204.

52 consistently blurs the boundaries between normative heterosexual masculinity and

femininity. For instance, in the Mystery of the Haunted Bridge, Nancy and her friends

are caring for Mr. Haley, an old man who has been knocked unconscious. In one scene

Nancy arrives at the cabin soaked. While her feminine outfit dries she changes into

some dry male clothing. The text reads, "The only clothes available were a pair of

slacks and an old blue shirt, a costume which gave her the appearance of a handsome

boy." When Mr. Haley wakes for a moment he is bewildered to find an unknown young

boy at his bed side. When Mr. Haley asks about Nancy's identity she replies:

"I am Nancy Drew, and I have come to help you. "

The old man shook his head in a baffled manner.

Nancy is a girl's name, " he mumbled. "You are a boy. The house is filled with

boys."^

That Nancy is unrecognizable in boy's clothing carries with it a pervasive

cultural lesson, especially for white heterosexual girls from the suburbs of middle-

America: tomboyish tendencies are no longer appropriate once the girl has reached puberty. The narrative circles back to reiterate this lessons around normal (and presumably fulfilling) femininity as later that night Nancy changes back into her girl clothes, and whips up a batch of delicious biscuits for her father, Ned, and his buddies.^^

Nancy's desire to return to her "natural" state sets up her cross-dressing episode as momentarily unintelligible behavior. As Judith Halberstam points out in her article "Oh

Bondage Up Yours!": "Tomboy identities are conveyed as benign forms of childhood identification as long as they evince acceptable degrees of femininity, appropriate

53 female aspiration, and as long as they promise to result in marriage and motherhood."^®

Thus, the cultural anxiety about the cross-dressing lesbian is mediated through a lesson

about ambiguous gender performances and the safety of normative feminine

heterosexuality. However, the more tutelage we receive about Nancy's femme qualities,

the more her heterosexual femininity seems contrived. That is, heterosexual girlhood

seems a tad flimsy if gender simply requires one to "keep up appearances." Nancy's

cross-dressing points out how the categories of male and female are always in

conversation, and represent a constant debate between the possibilities of both

normative and disruptive masculinity and femininity.

It is interesting to note that in the late-fifties, female relationships are censored

from the revised series.^’ A boyfriend is added to The Hidden Staircase, the Tumballs

are no longer sisters living alone, and in the revised Bungalow Mystery, Nancy and her

friends are not nestled together in little cabins at an all-girls camp. The editorial

changes in the books seem to suggest that among other changes made to the series,

including stripping Nancy of her independence, any potential lesbian elements were censored from the text. The presence of girls together—in girls' camps or in activities in which they lack the counterbalancing male presence—is dangerous. A complicated negotiation in the sphere of sexuality takes place in these edits, and in the series in general, as authors attempt to preserve Nancy's girlishness (as signaled by the pre- sexual but potentially lesbian body) while guarding against that body's lesbian potential.

^ Carolyn Keene, Mystery o f the Haunted Bridge, 153. ®^Ibid„ 166. Judith Halberstam, "Oh Bondage Up Yours!: Female Masculinity and the Tomboy," in Sissies and Tomboys., edited by Matthew Rottnek (New York: New York University, 1999), 156. A similar editorial move arises in England at the same time see Autchmuty's A World O f Girls. 5 4 Feminist scholars have begun to theorize identity as a complex and active

process that is constantly in flux and contingent on one's physical and cultural location

in a particular social and historical setting. Since locales consistently shift and overlap

in a myriad of ways, feminists find themselves highlighting the ways in which young

girls become women rather than on what it means to be a girl. Linda McDowell

summarizes this theoretical perspective when she writes that " all identities are a fluid

amalgam of memories of places and origins, constructed by and through fragments and nuances, journeys and rests, of movements between. Thus, the 'in-between' is itself a process or a dynamic, not just a stage on the way to a more final identity."^® This is not to suggest that identity is a social construct without material consequences; rather, the opportunity for movement between and among different combinations of identification allows for periodic landings from which to incite social change. More specifically, the metaphor of mobility is particularly helpful as a way to analyze women's representations of American girlhood.

Like Nancy Drew, women memoirists travel through space and outside of time, using memory rather than a blue roadster as their vehicle. As women memoirists re­ organize and recollect their girlhoods they traverse and highlight, explicitly and implicitly, how gendered childhood is invented on the body. Through their retrospective creations, women emphasize girlhood as physical and psychic territory.

Like Nancy, Susanna Kaysen, Kathryn Harrison, Dorothy Allison, bell hooks,

Marcia Aldrich and Maya Angelou and others refuse easy categorization and share a

McDowell, Linda. Gender, Identity and Place: Understanding Feminist Geographies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1999), 215. 55 reluctance to be defined as just a (hetero) sexual body. Women memoirist collectively

claim, "I am not that adolescent girl," and then each offers a personal story that reveals

the clues they've gathered about how cultural pedagogies about girlhood figured into

the invention of their own gendered, raced and classed identity. Through their

"excessive" bodies and their taboo stories of sexuality and its disturbing enactments in

compulsive promiscuity or father-daughter incest, women draws attention to how the

social categories of adolescent girlhood are produced rather than to how they are

different, or "just girls."

By evoking adolescent girlhood~the liminal space between girlhood and womanhood—women bridge the seemingly-private girl-rearing lessons with collective ones. Put another way, women use memoir as a means to move between the boundaries of fiction and personal truth, and in turn challenge familiar representations of American girlhood. This overlap between the public and the private parallels the collective and personal reading experiences of Nancy Drew fans. As the Nancy Drew mysteries suggest, gendered pedagogies, and ideologies about race, class and sexuality that make them comprehensible, are at work in everyday cultural materials such as popular fiction.

In memoir, women draw on this pedagogical material and in turn reorganize the lived experiences and literary representations of American girlhood.

5 6 CHAPTERS

DANGEROUS PASSAGE: PEDAGOGIES OF MENTAL ILLNESS

Of course I was sad and puzzled. I was eighteen, it was spring, and I was behind bars.

Susanna Kaysen

Like Nancy Drew, Susanna Kaysen finds herself suspended on the verge of

womanhood. However, while the girl-sleuth solves mysteries with her gal-pals in River

Heights, Kaysen swallows medications in a psychiatric ward with hers. After a twenty minute interview with a psychiatrist, Kaysen signs away her freedom and enrolls in

MacLean Hospital. Unlike her middle and upper middle class peers Kaysen does not attend college; rather, she finishes her lessons in girlhood at MacLean, that "exclusive, exotic boarding school."' Once inside MacLean, Kaysen receives what Emily Fox

Gordon refers to in her memoir. The Mockingbird Years, as a "therapeutic education."^

When Kaysen was institutionalized in 1967, women were the majority of psychiatric patients in American hospitals. In Women and Madness, Phyllis Chesler cites statistics from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and concludes that "women

' Susan Hall-Balduf, "Psych Ward is not Amusing," The Detroit Free Press (July 18, 1993), J7. ^ Gordon, EEmily Fox, Mockingbird Years: A Life In and Out of Therapy (New York: Basic Books, 2000). 5 7 comprised sixty percent of the psychiatric population in general hospitals between the

ages of eighteen and sixty four. Both percentages are higher than the percentage of

women in the population at large (which was fifty-one percent in 1960 and fifty-three

percent in 1970)." ‘ In her review of Girl, Interrupted in The New York Times, Susan

Cheever writes: "In the 1960s, when I applied to college, the really glamorous place, the

institutions where the most interesting girls went, were not the Ivy League's sister

colleges, like Smith, Wellesley, Radcliffe and Mount Holyoke, but the institutions in

another resort of Ivy League, places that also had tree-lined campuses with tennis courts and high tuitions—Austen Riggs in Stockbridge, Mass. And MacLean Hospital in

Belmont, Mass."^ As Cheever points out, Susanna Kaysen's story cannot be considered entirely personal as it is tied to a larger social context. Kaysen's memoir is a personal story with a cultural backdrop. Thus, Kaysen's memoir offers a perspective on mental health practices in the late 60s, as well as a commentary from her contemporary vantage point. For instance, in the twenty-five year span between her confinement and the writing of her memoir, Kaysen witnessed second-wave feminism as well as changes in the treatment and diagnosis of mental illness. From her perspective as an adult who reflects self-consciously on the out-of-time experience at MacLean, Kaysen provides as important commentary on young women and madness. Once published, her memoir enters the cultural arena where it intertwines with contemporary discourses about mental illness, adolescent girlhood, and female psycho-sexual development. Even an

‘ Phyllis Chesler. Women and Madness. (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1997; 1972). The trend of institutionalizing women in psychiatric wards is evident as well in the statistics for the years between 1968-1969 "the number of women in general psychiatric wards increased from 219,950 in 1968 to 259,701 in 1969; the male increase was from 150,630 to 160, 535." ^ Susan Cheever, "A Designated Crazy," The New York Titnes Book Review 58 account as personal as Kaysen's focused as it is on the particular milieu of MacLean, it

nonetheless achieves a larger resonance in the public sphere. As Leigh Gilmore points

out in Trauma and Testimony, memoir "cannily interjects the private into the public and

ensures that what is published cannot be considered exclusively private." ^

"But at the risk of ruining my new reputation as a memoirist, I now confess it: I had to

invent the dialogue. My argument is that it's true even if it might not be the facts."

Susanna Kaysen"*

In her study of the several nineteenth and twentieth century women's asylum autobiographies, Laura Wood points out how women inmates writing their autobiographies were "faced with the problem of how to create self-narratives that would be read as legitimate, as sane, when they themselves had been labeled insane."®

Kaysen faces a similar dilemma. Through her personal account she makes claims about her sanity, and her position in a gendered hierarchy. As a "crazy woman" Kaysen is aware of her unreliability as a narrator, and consistently negotiates the line where authorized psychological discourses bump up against her memories.

Leigh Gilmore writes that "the speaking subject emerges in relation to the possibilities and limitations on its construction. Of these, memory is crucial because it, like experience, is both what one possesses by virtue of living and what can be

(June, 20 1993). 1. ® Gilmore, Trauma, 6. “* Nancy Sharkey, "Two Years In The Bin," The New York Times Book Review (June 20,1993), 24. ^ Mary Elene Wood, The Writing on The Wall: Women's Autobiography and The Asylum 59 constituted as evidence only by submitting it to various tests and protocols of

presentation. As evidence, memory is only as authoritative as the person who is

remembering, and only to the degree permitted in particular contexts."® Memoir invites

a particular kind of authority since it is a genre in which fiction and personal memory

often overlap. As author and memoirist Dorothy Allison puts it: "I'm a storyteller. I'll

work to make you believe me. Throw in some real stuff, change a few details, add the

certainty of outrage. I know the use of fiction in a world of hard truth, the way fiction

can be a harder piece of truth."’ Similarly, it is through the hint of fiction that Kaysen

gains leverage on the facts.

In a section entitled " Do Y ou Believe Him or Me?" Kaysen recreates her

meeting with the doctor who would send her to MacLean. She brings the issue of her

legitimacy as a narrator to the forefront by refuting the referring doctor's claim that he met with her for over three hours before he committed her. She writes: "The doctor says he interviewed me for three hours. I say it was twenty minutes. Twenty minutes between my walking in the door and his deciding to send me to MacLean. I might have spent another hour in his office while he called the hospital, called my parents, called the taxi. An hour and a half is the most I'll grant him.

We can't both be right. Does it matter which of us is right?

(Chicago; University of Illinois Press, 1994), 11. ® Gilmore, Trauma, 24. ’ Dorothy Allison, Two or Three Things I Know For Sure (New York: Penguin, 1995), 3. Gilmore, Autobiographies, 25. 60 It matters to me (71). Kaysen makes several hypotheses about the doctor's point of

view, much like the hunches he makes about her psychological state, then she leads the

reader through the events as she remembers them.

Kaysen supports her claims by referring the reader to the hospital forms she

signed upon admittance to MacLean. Relying on the hospital's institutional zeal for

documentation, she discredits the doctor. Here, the very papers that mark "the crimes

against her " are also the papers that allow her to indict the psychiatrist who packed her

off to a mental institution. At the end of this section, she concludes: "There we are,

between nine and nine-thirty. I won't quibble over ten minutes. Now you believe me"

(72). In this way, Kaysen invites the reader to side with her as the authority on her

experience, and discredits the doctor and the claims that he makes to "know" her.

This is slippery territory and Kaysen cannily subverts the question about whether or not

she was crazy; instead she leads the reader toward a different kind of truth, one that exceeds the ways in which her psychiatric files construct her.

Girl, Interrupted is a representation of Kaysen's adolescent girlhood constructed twenty-five years after her stay at MacLean. Gilmore argues that the subject of autobiography always exists in relation to discourses of identity and truth. She writes:

"For that reason, I do not understand autobiography to be any experientially truer than other representations of the self or to offer an identity any less constructed than that produced by other forms of representations simply because the autobiographer intends the subject to correspond to herself or himself.”® Kaysen's "I" functions less as a marker of a "real" self than as a literary device through which she retrospectively

61 produces her experience in relation to larger cultural discourses around gender (identity)

and madness (truth), namely the notion of girlhood itself as a "dangerous passage."

What about me was so deranged that in less than half an hour a doctor would pack me

off to the nuthouse? He tricked me though: a couple of weeks. It was closer to two

years. I was eighteen.

Susanna Kaysen

Young women have been pathologized in different ways in various time periods

for "abnormal" behavior: Joan of Arc as possessed; Dora as hysterical; Monica

Lewinsky as troubled, and Susanna Kaysen as borderline. While the labels change,

diagnoses and treatments are often tied to a theory of pathologies housed within the female body. In particular, an adolescent girl's health and her sexuality arises as a central point of concern for teachers, psychologists, and parents. A brief historical sketch of how adolescent girlhood has come to be understood as a time of vulnerability in women's development provides a context for understanding the gendered pedagogies

Kaysen engages with in her memoir.

In Disorderly Conduct, feminist Carroll Smith-Rosenberg argues that the physical changes in the girl's body at puberty arose as one of the most compelling

62 narratives for understanding female development in Victorian America.^ The onset of

puberty was a period of vulnerability that could be easily disrupted by "bad" choices.

For instance, "if a girl, especially at the very outset of puberty, violated the laws of her

body, a dire chain of pain and disease, of dysmenorrhea, miscarriage, even sterility

would surely follow."Reproductive organs defined the young woman's emotional and

social life. Subject to monthly disruptions young women learned that they inhabited

bodies that required constant surveillance in order to be mastered.

Representations of female coming of age have shifted since the late 19“' century;

however, puberty remains defined largely as "a period of heightened opportunities and

dangers, a time when the consequences of a false step today are not easily retrievable tomorrow."" For instance, in her memoir. Bone Black, bell hooks writes about how behind the discovery of sexual pleasure hung the dangers of female sexuality, hooks writes;

A boy coming into awareness of his sexuality is on his way to manhood—it is an important moment. The stained sheets that show signs of his having touched his body are flags of victory. They—the girls—have not such moments. Sexuality is something that will be done to them, something they have to fear. It can bring unwanted pregnancy. It can turn one into a whore. It is a curse. It will ruin a young girl's life, pull her into pain again and again, into childbirth, into welfare, into all sorts of longings that will never be satisfied.'^

’ Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions o f Gender in Victorian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). Ibid., 186. " Constance Nathanson, Dangerous Passage: The Social Control of Sexuality in Women's Adolescence (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991), ?. " bell hooks, Botie Black: Memories of Girlhood (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1996), 112.

6 3 Regardless of the large number of positive female sexuality books written for

young girls, the contemporary trajectory of female development echoes this idea of

adolescence as a treacherous passage. The girl-child is free and unfettered by

convention until her biological clock strikes when latent and often pathological material

housed within the girl's body suddenly manifests itself during puberty. As Judy Blume

the popular children's writer and author of Are You There God? It's Me Margaret puts

it: "Girl power means you get to make the decisions, to control your own actions. It's

really easy to say this, but once those hormones hit, sex takes over your life. That's not

going away, so the best thing we can do is to talk to girls and accept this, not knock

it."*^ The pedagogies of dangerous passage inform Kaysen's diagnosis and treatment as

well as her retrospective account in Girl, Interrupted. Throughout her memoir, Kaysen

engages with this "cultural truth" and attempts to resist it by offering another reading of

her confinement in a mental hospital, one that underscores her legitimacy as an

authoritative speaking subject and one which subverts the psychiatric discourses that

defined her girlhood experiences and behaviors as pathological.

Someone who acts "normal' raises the uncomfortable question. What's the difference between that person and me? Which leads to the question, WTiat's keeping me out of the loony bin?

Susanna Kaysen

" Judy Blume in Hues, “Girl Power,”5. 6 4 Foucault has claimed that power functions less by providing a spectacle than in

regulating behaviors through everyday practices. For Foucault, power resides in 'the

problematization of the criminal behind his crime, the concern with a punishment that is

a correction, a therapy, a normalization, the division of the act of judgement between

various authorities that are supposed to measure, asses, diagnoses, cure and transform

individuals.""'* Susanna Kaysen's experience in MacLean highlights how power

manifests itself through the regulation of the individual. In a mental hospital power

disguises itself through diagnosis and treatment. A psychiatrist examines Kaysen,

defines her behavior as abnormal, and provides her with a diagnosis: borderline

personality disorder. This "illness" requires treatment; in this case, a stay in a

psychiatric facility. Once there, doctors and nurses document Kaysen's behaviors,

assess her progress, and seek to rehabilitate her through therapy. The patient's day in

MacLean is consistently interrupted by nurses who "check" the inmates at routine intervals. Similarly, in the hospital environment, daily activities take on a particular meanings. She writes: "They had a special language: regression, acting out, hostility, withdrawal, indulging in behavior. This last phrase could be attached to any activity and make it sound suspicious: indulging in eating behavior, talking behavior, writing behavior. In the outside world people ate and talked and wrote, but nothing we did wds simple" (84) This is not to suggest that Kaysen lacked agency; indeed power requires resistance. As Foucault puts it, "where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or

“* Foucault, Discipline, 227. 6 5 rather consequently, this resistance is never in a positions of exteriority in relation to

power.

Rebellion and conformity are scripted within a larger discursive network.

Foucault does not propose "empowerment" or "freedom" outside of current power

arrangements; rather, he has more particular goals and suggests the possibility of

resistance, namely in the form of reverse discourses. In The History o f Sexuality

Foucault writes: “We must make allowance for the complex and unstable process

whereby discourse can be both an instrument and an effect of power, but also a hindrance, a stumbling block, a point of resistance and a starting point for an opposing strategy."*® Kaysen often proves to be a resistant patient.

In one section, Kaysen recreates a representative conversation with Dr. Wick, the one female doctor at MacLean. In this scene Dr. Wick brings up Kaysen's

"attachment" with her high-school English teacher.

"The —ah—attachment. How did it start?"

"Oh, later, back home." Suddenly I know what she wants.

"I was at his house. We had poetry meetings at his house. And everybody had left, so we were just sitting there on the sofa alone. And he said, 'Do you want to fuck?' "

(Rush.) "He used that word?"

"Yup." He didn't. He kissed me. And he'd kissed me in New York too. But why should I disappoint her?

This was called therapy" (87).

In his book Saint Foucault David Haleprin offers an example of how Foucault's notion of reverse discourse might be applied to homosexuality. Foucault, History, 100-1. 6 6 Kaysen disrupts the script by substituting the clinical term "attachment" with "fuck," a

word she knows will satisfy the portrait of her as sexually deviant, which both confirms

the doctor's assumption at the same time Kaysen gains the edge. It is the doctor who

blushes in this scene not Kaysen. For a moment, it is the psychologist who is in the 'hot

seat' caught off guard by the prescribed language between analyst and analysand.

Kaysen's personal narrative engages with, rather than reacts to, authorized psychiatric discourses, and as she places pressure on the gendered terms of her diagnosis she offers the sort of discursive reversals Foucault specifies. Within her memoir, Kaysen nests "counter-pedagogies." We can think of counter-pedagogies like reverse discourses, operating within the pedagogies of girlhood less as a stable set of reactive lessons than as flexible tools through which to resist and reorganize dominant discourses about girl-rearing. Just as counterpoint melodies exists above or below the main one, counter pedagogies move about in relation to dominant themes. In what follows 1 explore how Kaysen creates counter-pedagogies that resist, albeit temporarily, normative ideas about girlhood and girl-rearing.

Kaysen frames her memoir around the charges against her, namely that she has a "personality disorder." Kaysen's begins her narrative with her official case record that reads: "Established diagnosis, mental disorder: Borderline personality." She devotes an entire chapter to her diagnosis in which she quotes the Diagnostic and Statistical

Manual's section on Borderline Personality of Mental Disorders (S'^)edition.

Kaysen lets the DSM speak for itself, and the chapter stands alone.

It is not until the next chapter that Kaysen moves away from generalized medical language of the DSM and interprets her diagnosis from her own perspective.

6 7 For instance she juxtaposes the DSMs generic language, "An essential feature of this

disorder is a pervasive pattern of instability of self-image, interpersonal relationships,

and mood, beginning in early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts," with her

own observations (147). She writes, "instability of self-image, interpersonal

relationships, and mood.. .uncertainty about. .. long-term goals or career choice. .. isn't

this a good description of adolescence? Moody, fickle, faddish, insecure: in short,

impossible" (152). Using the language of the DSM, Kaysen attempts offers her own interpretation of herself at eighteen. She argues:

My self-image was not unstable. I saw myself, quite correctly, as unfit for the educational and social systems. But my parents and teachers did not share my self-image. Their image of me was unstable, since it was out of kilter with reality and based on their needs and wishes. They did not put much value on my capacities, which were admittedly few, but genuine. I read everything, I wrote constantly, and I had boyfriends by the barrelful. (155)

Kaysen doesn’t disagree with the description of herself, rather she refuses the meaning applied to that seemingly objective list of terms. She writes; "I'm tempted to try refuting it but then I would be open to the further charges of 'defensiveness' and

'resistance.' All I can do is give the particulars: an annotated diagnosis" (151). Kaysen interprets the psychiatric language that was used to analyze and describe her. She offers an addendum that critiques the rickety concepts that undergird her diagnosis as borderline, and momentarily opens up the possibility of resistance. In particular, her shift in perspective allows the reader to see the gendered pedagogies that undergird the diagnosis of a borderline personality.

68 Kaysen articulates the inequitable and often opaque lessons that make her

diagnosis and confinement possible by placing pressure on the gendered terms of the

label "personality disorder." She quotes from the DSM, borderline personality disorder

" is more commonly diagnosed in women." She provides the following analysis: "Note

the construction of that sentence. They did not write, 'the disorder is more common in

women.' It would still be suspect, but they didn't even both trying to cover their tracks.

Many disorders, judging by the hospital population, were, more commonly diagnosed in

women"(157). She notes that, "in the list of six 'potentially self-damaging' activities favored by the borderline personality, three are commonly associated with women

(shopping sprees, shoplifting, and eating binges) and one with men (reckless driving).

One is not "gender-specific," as they say these days (psychoactive substance abuse).

And the definition of the other (casual sex) is in the eye of the beholder" (158).

Kaysen's borderline symptoms manifest themselves in this last symptom, compulsive promiscuity.

On Kaysen's admission form, under reason for referral the text reads:

"profoundly depressed—suicidal. Increasing pattemlessness of life, promiscuous: might kill self, or get pregnant" (9). It begs attention that suicide and out-of-wed lock pregnancy are both signs of pathology and sufficient reason for confinement. Here, out of wedlock pregnancy, like suicide, is symptomatic of some sort of psychic trouble.

" This definition of pregnancy as a psychological problem is tied in part to larger pedagogical attempts to construct white middle class women as sexually innocent. As the number of out of wed lock middle class white mothers increased during the Post War era, the label of sex-delinquent used to refer to women of color or lower class women was replaced. In her article "White Neurosis, Black Pathology Regina Kunzel writes: "Accordingly, psychiatric explanations desexualized out-of-wedlock pregnancy. Branding single mothers as sex delinquents had defined them as hyper-sexual; diagnosing white middle- class unmarried mothers as neurotic defined them as sexually passive, as asexual." (313). 6 9 Conformity and rebellion, occur in a girl's psyche, and manifests itself in the form of

either a healthy or a deviant body. Kaysen makes the link between a girl's sexual

practices and her mental health. She asks: "How many girls do you think a seventeen-

year-old boy would have to screw to earn the label 'compulsively promiscuous'?

Three? No, not enough. Six? Doubtful. Ten? That sounds more likely. Probably in

the fifteen-to-twenty range, would be my guess—if they ever put that label on boys,

which I don't recall their doing.

And for seventeen-year-old-girls, how many boys?" (158).'®

Similarly, in "Promiscuity in Adolescence," an article published in 1965 in the

American Journal of Orthopsychiatry the author doesn't specify the gender of his subjects; rather, the term "promiscuity" signals his readers that this is a study about adolescent females. According to Walters, in early adolescence, girls search for an ideal object through close relationships with many different kinds of men. Walters frames the "dilemma of adolescent female sexuality" in the following way: "the 'normal' young woman may have close relationships with many men; however she delays sexual activity until she finds a 'suitable (synonymous with marriageability in most cases) man." The girl chooses a sexual partner in late adolescence. Walters concludes: "If intercourse is not delayed until this point, it indicates a serious failure of ego development."'® This theorization of female sexual development frames how the doctors at MacLean interpret Kaysen's "attachment" to her high-school English teacher.

“ Paul Walters, "Promiscuity in Adolescence," American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 35 ,4 (1965), 671.

Ibid., 671.

70 This student-teacher relationship haunts Kaysen's narrative, providing a curious

undercurrent to the narrative's focus on the etiology of mental illness. Kaysen's high-

school education included private tutoring in heterosex from her English teacher. While

Kaysen does not make an explicit correlation between her final breakdown and her

relationship with the English teacher, its prominence in the narrative suggests its psychic import. The title of Kaysen's memoir alludes to Vermeer's famous painting housed in the Frick museum, "Girl Interrupted at Her Music." Kaysen writes; "It's the painting from whose frame a girl looks out, ignoring her beefy music teacher, whose proprietary hand rests on her chair.. .1 looked into her brown eyes and I recoiled. She was warning me of something—she had looked up from her work to warn me. Her mouth was slightly open, as if she had just drawn a breath in order to say to me,

'Don't!’" (166). Kaysen first sees the painting on a trip to the museum with her high- school English teacher, who after the visit pursues an intimate relationship, violating the student-teacher boundary. Kaysen realizes later that the girl in the Frick painting offered her a warning: "I didn’t listen to her. I went out to dinner with my English teacher, and he kissed me, and I went back to Cambridge and failed biology, though I did graduate, and, eventually, I went crazy" (166). The psychiatric discourses around

Kaysen's failed sexual development function to gloss over the teacher's power in relation to his female student, or from another angle, Kaysen's desire for him. Read as a case of abnormal female sexual development, Kaysen is constructed through psychiatric discourse as a personality who is so ill-defines that she cannot distinguish between healthy attachments and unhealthy ones. The cultural pedagogies here inform Kaysen

71 that she has chosen the wrong route in her attempt to safely navigate the dangerous

passage from girlhood to adulthood.

Kaysen leams however that she can re-direct her course, and she does so by

accepting a marriage proposal. Her passport out of MacLean is a marriage license.

Susanna Kaysen is released from the hospital through the same gendered criteria

through which she entered it. About her release she writes; "Recovered. Had my

personality crossed over that border, whatever and wherever it was, to resume life

within the confines of the normal?" (154). Normalcy comes in the form of "compulsory

heterosexuality." Kaysen passes from a mental institution to the institution of marriage.

Although Kaysen continues to resist the idea that she has recovered, her therapeutic

education is complete. She returns to the image of the girl in the Vermeer painting.

She writes, "interrupted at her music: as my life had been, interrupted in the music of being seventeen, as her life had been, snatched and fixed on canvas: one moment made to stand still and to stand for all the other moments, whatever they would be or might have been. What life can recover from that?"

I point this out to underscore how resistances to normative ideas about girl- rearing are often fleeting victories. For instance, Kaysen ultimately submits to the norms of white middle class womanhood by accepting a marriage proposal. An even more salient example of how pedagogies about girlhood are always at play emerges in the movie version of Kaysen's memoir. In 1999Girl, Interrupted was made into a

Hollywood movie starring Winona Ryder as Kaysen. In this variant, Kaysen enters the hospital as a sullen patient. Given the prevalence of the "wounded girl" figure in the

1990s it is not surprising that Kaysen is saved by a caring nurse, played by Whoopie

7 2 Goldberg, who offers her tough love in the form of a dunk in cold bath water and a

verbal reprimand: "you are a self-indulgent little girl who is driving herself crazy." In

this version of Kaysen's memoir the pedagogies take a more contemporary cast, the

young woman is saved not through a marriage proposal but by talking with her doctors,

in this case an intelligent and compassionate Mrs. Wick. Most importantly this

contemporary Kaysen has a girl-power attitude; with the help of a concerned adult she

pulls herself up by her bootstraps and gets over it. The film version is only one

example of how Kaysen's memoir played out in the contemporary scene. In the next

section, I want to look at the ways in which Kaysen's memoir and its counter

pedagogies were read throughout the 1990s.

Why did she do it? Nobody knew. Nobody dared to ask. Because—what courage!

Who had the courage to bum herself? Twenty aspirin, a little slit alongside the veins of the arm, maybe even a bad half hour standing on the roof: We've all had those.

Susanna Kaysen

Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted h&camQ a "surprise" best seller. Booksellers had difficulty keeping the book in stock. The memoir appeared on the front cover of The

New York Times Book Review, and a reporter for the Boston Globe suggests that Girl,

Interrupted threatens to replace Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar as the "must-read for young women in high school and college."^ Girl, Interrupted appeared on The Chronicle for

“ Alison Bass, "New 'Girl' In Class: Young Women Find Susanna Kaysen's Book Hits a Chord, Edging Out 'Bell Jar" On Must-Read Lists" The Boston Globe (May 1 2000), B7. 73 Higher Education's "What They're Reading on College Campuses" 2000 survey; and,

remained on The New York Times paperback bestseller list for at least seven years after

its publication. Kaysen herself has appeared on Oprah and has been featured in a

variety of magazines including Vanity Fair and Time.^' The reasons for Kaysen's

success are somewhat happenstance. Her memoir is published in the midst of an era

when adolescent girls were constructed by authors such as Mary Pipher as vulnerable to

a host of psychological disorders. Girl also emerged in the midst of a cultural debate

about the use of drugs such as Prozac to heal depression (Prozac was approved in 1998).

Peter Kramer's best-selling Listening to Prozac, for example, came out in same year as

Girl, Interrupted. Finally, the 1990s were also an era in which memoirs were a popular literary genre.

That Kaysen is somewhat uneasy about the public attention she has received emerges in various interviews. For example, in USA Today Kaysen says, "I outed myself, I guess you could say . . . But I feel that my loony bin experience was a very small part of my life. I've done so many other things that all this attention on this one aspect is a little unnerving to me."^ Perhaps one of the most surprising responses to

Kaysen's book was the reaction she received from young women. Regardless of

Kaysen's efforts to resists being the representative crazy-girl or as she puts it the "poster child" for mental illness, she has become an exemplar of female adolescent resistance.

The popularity of Girl, Interrupted suggests that the girlhood lessons Kaysen names.

“ Stephen McCauley, "Kaysen Point," Vanity Fair. (July, 1993), 60; Andrea Sachs, "The Unconfessional Confessionalist." Time, (July, 11 1994), 60.

Craig Wilson, "Riveting Snapshots Of a Life 'Interrupted' By Mental Illness," USA Today (July 21,1993), 9D. 7 4 resists, and critiques in her memoir may echo the concerns of contemporary adolescent

girls who find themselves similarly diagnosed as mentally ill.

Kaysen's memoir has been defined as a "girl's" story, as opposed to the more

universal (read male) coming of age narrative. Girl, Interrupted has emerged as a sort of

alternative textbook for young women. Mostly, although not exclusively, white middle-

and upper-class adolescent female readers have flocked to Kaysen. A Boston Globe

reporter writes: "Girls and young women who have perhaps had some of the same

suicidal thoughts and self-destructive behaviors that Kaysen did as an 18-year-old have

been some of the biggest fans of the book."^ During Kaysen's promotional tour for

Girl, Interrupted young girls with bandages on their wrists waited to speak with Kaysen about their own suicide attempts. In an interview Kaysen states that the girls "wanted to look at me and understand themselves."^ Kaysen herself was surprised by the success of the book. In an interview she states: "I didn't understand the fascination with autobiography. Take that and add the loony bin and you get a strange literary response.

The reaction I'm getting has nothing to do with the book. The attention is on me as a person, not as a writer."^ Given that Kaysen writes about her suicide attempt ant that

"young women between the ages of fifteen and nineteen are two and a half more times likely to attempt suicide than are young men," it is perhaps not all that surprising that girls turn to Kaysen. Her personal account of her experiences makes her somehow

“ Kong, Dolores. "At MacLean, Lives Interrupted—And Healed." The Boston Globe. (January 17,2000), 2.

“ Michael Kenney, "The Naked Truth" The Boston Globe (April 8, 1997), 6. “ Nancy Sharkey, "Two Years In The Bin," The New York Times Book Review (June 20, 1993), 24. 75 accessible. In a curious turn of events, Kaysen finds herself turning away from these

girls, much like her psychiatrists who kept her at arms length.

These responses to Kaysen's text suggests that girls continue to ingest a cultural

pedagogy that teaches them to turn their anger and fear inward rather than outward, that

instructs them to view self-destruction as the only viable option for resistance. Girls'

suicide attempts are cause for alarm; however, given the high incidence of attempts it

may be that self-inflicted harm might be cultural rite through which young women act

out and resist the girlhood pedagogies that frame their passage from girlhood to

womanhood. Kaysen, for example, describes her suicide attempt as symbolic of her

desire to kill one part of herself. About her committal to a mental hospital she writes: "I

wasn't a danger to society. Was I a danger to myself? The fifty aspirin—but I've

explained them. There were metaphorical" (39). It may be that through suicide

attempts, and other forms of self-mutilation, such as wrist banging or cutting, girls make

public the pedagogy of interpersonal violence and victimization that frame their individual experiences.^

These physical symptoms may be less pathological than an adaptive response to trauma. Feminist Laura Brown argues that trauma is not "outside the range" of everyday life, especially for oppressed groups. For instance, within hetero-patriarchy, women and girls experience and/or recognize the potential threat of gender-based violence albeit in different constellations given the variables of race, class, and sexual orientation. She

“ For more information on self-mutilation see Marilee Strong, A Bright Red Scream: Self- Mutilation and The Language of Pain (New York: Viking Penguin, 1998; Penguin Paperback, 1999). “ Laura Brown, "Not Outside the Range: One Feminist Perspective on Psychic Trauma in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, edited by Cathy Caruth, 100-112. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1995), 220. 76 argues that behaviors commonly linked with character disorders might be read as an

adaptive response to repressive social norms. In this sense, Kaysen's borderline

symptoms emerge as "a normative, functional, and at times creative (although distressed

response to potentially dangerous situations and oppressive cultural norms.In this

way girls' symptoms emerge as a comprehensible and likely response to repressive

social norms or traumatic experiences rather than as the symptoms of a disorganized

personality. It may be that the trauma girls have to report is not something that is easily

verbalized. After all, it took Susanna Kaysen twenty five years to put her girlhood

experiences into language.

It may be that adolescent girls use their own bodies to represent the "soul

murder" that young woman experience on a daily basis in this culture that teaches girls

that their experiences are inconsequential, that their reactions to oppression are

pathological and that their bodies incite gender-based violence. In Girl, Interrupted

Kaysen questions the idea that madness is solely the result of some hormones, a

disorganized personality, or a chemical imbalance. As she charts the "topography" of her illness and marks that place where she made a border crossing into a "parallel world" of madness, she simultaneously charts the complexities and consequences of girlhood resistance for another generation of American girls.

^ Laura Brown, "Not Outside the Range: One Feminist Perspective on Psychic Trauma,” in Trauma; Explorations in Memory, edited by Cathy Caruth, 100-112. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1995), 220. 77 CHAPTER 4

THE DAUGHTER'S DISENCHANTMENT: INCEST AS PEDAGOGY IN

FAIRY TALES AND KATHRYN HARRISON'S THE KISS

If I were 'poor white trash,' living in a trailer park, with a broken marriage, people would be more willing to forgive me. But they don't want to admit that these things occur among well-heeled, well-educated people who read literary fiction.

Kathryn Harrison

One of America's most popular misconceptions, especially among white middle- and upper-middle classes, is that incest is a rare occurrence. Father-daughter incest often goes unreported and unpunished in part because of the cultural silence around it. While exact figures are hard to pin down, current statistics suggest that anywhere from one in four to one in three girls experience sexual abuse at the hands of fathers or surrogate fathers. ‘ Feminist scholars such as Judith Herman, and Diane Russell have

‘ Judith Herman, Father Daughter Incest (Cambridge: Harvard University, 1981) and Diana Russell, The Secret Trauma: Incest in the Lives o f Girls and Women (New York: Basic Books, 1986). According to statistics from the Third national Itwidence o f Child Abuse and Neglect (NIS-3) (1996) survey from the Department of Health and Human services. Girls are vulnerable to sexual abuse beginning at three years of age. A 1996 report from the Department of Health and Human Services suggests that girls are three times more likely to be sexually abused than boys, and consistently vulnerable to sexual assault beginning at the age of three (NIS-3). Sexual abuse is experienced by both boys and girls. For the purposes of this project 1 focus only on the daughter in the family.

78 demonstrated that incest is at least as prevalent in white middle- and upper-middle class

homes as it is elsewhere.' As feminist historian Linda Gordon writes; "Perhaps the

most extraordinary and frightening characteristic of domestic incest is its taking on the

appearance of the ordinary, its experience within the family as normal."^ Far from

confirming that incest only happens in certain homes, research suggests that the sexual

abuse of daughters is a ubiquitous cultural practice that cuts across racial and class

lines.

If the daughter reports sexual abuse the father's innocence is usually assumed

whereas the girl is usually disbelieved and asked to provide corroborating evidence

and/or undergo psychiatric or medical evaluation to prove her case. The questions often

posed to the daughter revolve around her ability to tell the truth: Is she fantasizing?

Did she ask for it? Is she lying? In short, the daughter faces a character test that is culturally loaded in the father's favor. Father-daughter incest remains hidden, in part, because of the (white) father's privileged position in and access to cultural institutions, such as the legal system. The daughter finds herself in a terrible bind, she is raped by her father and blamed for his violations. That the daughter is expected to remain silent about the father's sexual abuse provides a crude reminder that children, especially girl- children "should be seen but not heard." Within the family the sexually-abused

' The study also found that there was no significant race differences in the incidences in of maltreatment or maltreatment-related injuries uncovered in the NIS-2 or NIS-3. While the report concludes that children from the lowest income families are 18 times more likely to be sexually abused, it is probable that the higher incidence of incest is due to the prevalence of social services in the lives of low-income families. The estimated number of sexually abused children increased from an estimated 1333,600 children in 1986 to 300,200 in 1996. ^ Linda Gordon, Heroes of Their Own lives: The Politics and History o f Family Violence (New York: Viking, 1988), 233.

79 daughter undergoes a cultural enchantment, a magic spell that transforms her into a

silent seductress.

The cultural denial about father-daughter incest has surfaced a recent scandal.

In 1997 Kathryn Harrison published The Kiss, a memoir about father daughter incest.

The Kiss did not gamer the sympathetic response one might anticipate a memoir about

sexual abuse receiving; rather, Kathryn Harrison found herself caught up in a scandal

about privacy, propriety, and consent. The problem seems to be Harrison's age at the

time of the incest: she was 20 and a sophomore in college (check this fact). About

Harrison's representation of incest, a critic from the Boston Globe writes: "Occurring as

it did over a period of several years when she was in her 20s, it is 'an affair,' not a case

of sexual abuse."^ Michael Kenney's semantic distinction between an affair and sexual

abuse reveals a strategy of renaming and misnaming that is part of how the cultural

silence around incest is built. Furthermore, what criticisms like Kenney's reacts to

symptomatically is a deep seated cultural anxiety over where girlhood ends and

adulthood begins, or where the sexually innocent young girl is exposed to the

incestuous demands of an adult with little chance of escape and where the presumed autonomy and sexual knowledge of adulthood begins.

The Kiss offers no easy answers. Harrison herself is at once a daughter and her father's lover, simultaneously iimocent child and sexually-knowledgeable woman. What

Harrison's memoir does provide is a glimpse into contemporary views about girlhood and girl-rearing. In particular. The Kiss lays out how pedagogies about female sexuality exonerate the father, through a curriculum that insists that the female body is a site of

80 shame. Simply put, the father hides behind a cultural pedagogy that insists on the

adolescent girl's tainted sexuality -which, in turn, justifies his violence and violation.

Key to this revelation are the ways in which Harrison underscores the ambiguous and

contradictory lessons that differentiate girlhood from womanhood through her use of fairy

tales, themselves texts for a mixed audience. Since Harrison's memoir is about sexual

abuse within the family it is not surprising that she draws on fairy tale literature. Fairy

tales,"* or wonder tales, stage scenes in which the family appears as a site of violence,

where (step)mothers poison their (step) daughters, where children are abandoned, and

where rapacious fathers violate their daughters. A young woman, for instance, may spend

adolescence in humiliated service to an evil stepmother, wait for a prince in a glass-

coffin, or suffer the attentions of a beast.dn Harrison's case, she spends that gap between

girlhood and womanhood in the clutches of her rapacious father.

In The Kiss Harrison draws specifically on a group of stories in hagiography and fairy tales that feature a wronged daughter "in flight from the unwelcome desire of a man, who is her father or otherwise a man in power, an emperor, a prefect, a tyrant."^

When she is ten, Harrison receives a boxed set of the Lives of Saints. She recalls that she studied and slept with the two volumes that chronicled the lives of female martyrs.

In particular she remembers Saint Dympna, a figure to whom Harrison alludes

^ Michael Kenney, "The Naked Truth," The Boston Globe (April 8, 1997): E 6. “ Maria Tatar situates the fairy tale within the oral and literary folktale tradition. However, the term fairy tale "is above all reserved for narratives set in a fictional world where preternatural events and supernatural intervention are taken wholly for granted. A fairy tale can thus belong to the category of folktales, but it stands in contrast to the folk tale, which is sharply biased in favor of earthy realism." M3.ndLTa.tax,The Hard Facts ofThe Grimms' Fairy Tales (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 33. ^ Marina Warner, From The Beast To The Blotide: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1994), 346.

81 throughout her memoir. Dymphna was a seventh-century Irish princess who escaped

her pagan father's incestuous demands by fleeing with her confessor, Gerbemus, across

the Irish Sea and Channel to Belgium. There, disguised as travelling minstrels,

Gerbemus and Dympna travel deep into the forest, build a hut out of branches, and live

as hermits. Dympna's father, angered at her disobedience, pursues Dympna and

beheads her.

Dympna is especially significant here because her narrative is linked to the fairy

tale "Cinderella." In her introduction to Father-Daughter Incest, Judith Herman

observes that Dympna's story is tied to a variant of "Cinderella," "Allerleirauh," found

in the Grimms' fairy tale collection.® Like Dympna, Allerleirauh, or All-Fur, rejects an

incestuous father, experiences a fall from grace, escapes from her father's kingdom,

hides in the woods, and marries a prince, which parallels Dympna's marriage to Christ

in heaven.’ Harrison's specific references to Saint Dymphna coupled with her allusions

to fairy tales invite a reading of The Kiss alongside the Grimms' "All-Fur." 1 offer that

here in the context of the larger project.

* For a full discussion on the origins of the "Catkin" tale and its relationship to "Cinderella," see Alan Dundes, ed., Cinderella: A Casebook (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1988), Maria Tatar, Off With Their Heads! Fairy Tales and The Culture of Childhood (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), and WarnerB east. For full discussion of the relationship between Dymphna and the "All-Fur" tale see Warner, Beast. 82 My father leans across the table. His face is the same shape but much larger than mine,

seemingly larger than other men's. At close range, it seems planetary. "You," he says,

too loudly for a restaurant, "are a slut just like your mother.”

Kathryn Harrison

In the "All-Fur" variant of "Cinderella" the father rather than the step mother persecutes the daughter. Because of its father-daughter incest motif, All-Fur has generally been erased from Western fairy tale collections. More familiar Cinderella variants, Disney's for instance, construct the father as an ineffectual man who exposes his daughter to harm by remarriage and the installation of a step-mother in the house.

The erasure of the lustful patriarch has been covered in detail in several other sources.

Here 1 provide only a brief history of the Anglo-American fairy tale canon as one way to understand how the rapacious father disappeared.®

For the most part, our Anglo-American fairy tale canon derives from the nineteenth century collections of Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm.’ Not intended originally for children, by the beginning of the twentieth century fairy tales were considered children's fare. As the audience for fairy tales shifted, so did the lessons within the tales.T he revisions made by the Grimms after 1819, for instance, reveal the brothers', particularly Wilhelm's, desire to make Nursery and Household

Tales more suitable for a younger audience. In their introduction to the 1819 edition.

Tatar, Hard Facts; Warner, Beast. ® Charles Perrault, Perrault's Complete Fairy 7a/e^, Translated by A.E. Johnson, et al. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1961. Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm, The Complete Fairy Tales of The Brothers Grimm, translated by Jack Zipes ( Toronto: Bantam, 1987; Bantam Paperback, 1992).

83 the brothers discuss "the manner in which they made the stories more pure, truthful and

just." In the process, they "eliminated those passages which they thought would be

harmful to children's eyes."" This included censoring any material that was sexual

while "lurid portrayals of child abuse, starvation, and exposure, like fastidious

descriptions of cruel punishments, on the whole escaped censorship."'^

It seems the Grimms' viewed incest as more racy material rather than as violent content.

That is, the lustful patriarch makes a suspicious exit from the majority of tales included

in the Grimms' final edition of the Children's and Household Tales published in 1857,

not due to his dissimilarity to other cruelties but because of his "unnatural" passions.

The degree to which the brothers censured the lustful father is evident when the

history of "Cinderella" is considered. In a definitive study of over three-hundred

versions of "Cinderella," Marian Cox defines three variants of the tale: "Cinderella"

(510A) in which the heroine is mistreated by her stepmother; "Catskin" (510B), a tale

about a heroine pursued by an incestuous father; and "Cap O' Rushes" (5IOC), in

which a father demands a pledge of filial love {King Lear^P What is significant is that

of the over 300 Cinderella variants that Cox analyzes, the incestuous father appears almost as often as the evil stepmother; thus, as Maria Tatar points out, the heroine is as likely to leave the home because of her father's incestuous desire as her (step) mother's tyranny. Yet, for the one story in the Grimms' Nursery and Household Tales that openly depicts a father's persecution of his daughter, there are twelve that recount a girl's

For more detailed analyses of the specific changes the Grimms made see (cite Zipes works here) '' Jack Zipes, Fairy Tales and The Art of Subversion (New Y ork: Wildman Press, 1983), 48. " Maria Tatar, Hard Facts, 10.

84 misery at the hands of her stepmother.‘'‘As Jane Yolen argues in "America's

Cinderella," variants of "Cinderella"—such as All-Fur—that portray an intelligent and

independent heroine remain invisible on the cultural radar screen.'^

That the (step)mother had emerged as the central villain of the Grimms' fairy

tale collection is demonstrated in a 1894 review of the Grimms' Tales in The New York

Times. The reviewer writes;

The stepmother is, unquestionably, the greatest bogy in the tales collected by the Grimms. A child bred on these stories must have held her in greater awe than he felt for the seven-headed dragon or the wolf. She is the protagonist in a least half of the tales: she is always brutal and venomous, and frequently gifted with the fateful powers of witchcraft. Not a good word is ever spoken of her."'

This critic aptly describes the Grimms' successful revision. The wicked father and his

crime is overshadowed by the step-mother and her brutality. Y et, the silence around the father is loaded. We are never quite sure, for instance, why the step-mother fears her step-daughter and feels the need to humiliate her, or why the father never intervenes on

Cinderella's behalf.

This example demonstrates how the Grimms distorted lessons about gender through the ways in which they edited and selected the tales.O n ce the sticky editorial fingers of the Grimms' Brothers are noted, arguments about fairy tales as the arbiters of

" Marian Cox, Cinderella: Three Hundred and Forty-Five Variants o f Cinderella, Catskin, and Cap O' Rushes, edited by Andrew Lang. (London: David Nutt, 1893). “* Tatar, Hard Facts, 153. Jane Yolen, "The America's Cinderella, " in Cinderella, edited by Alan Dundes, 290-306. Book review of Children's and Household Tales, The New York Times (July 22, 1894). Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, feminist scholars focused on the gendered lessons within fairy tales. See Ruth Bottigheimer, Grimms' Bad Girls and Bold Boys: The Moral and Social Vision of the Tales (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987); Marcia K. Lieberman, "'Some Day My Prince Will Come': Female Acculturation Through The Fairy Tale," College English, 34 {1972): 3S3-95; Kay Stone, "The Misuses of Enchantment: Controversies on the Significance of Fairy Tales," in Women's Folklore, Women's Culture, edited by Rosan A. Jordan and Susan J. Kalcik (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985).

85 "universal" truths become hard to sustain. Our Anglo-American fairy tale collections

drawn in part from the Grimms, then, exist as complex reflections of particular

historical and cultural contexts. '®A case study of the Grimms' "All-Fur" further

demonstrates how the brothers contorted the gendered pedagogies within the tale to

protect the father's privilege through the collusive mother and the seductive daughter.

The Grimms do include "All-Fur" in their final edition of the Children's and

Household Tales', however, a close reading of the tale reveals how the brothers edit the

text in a way that absolves the father. The Grimms' "All-Fur" begins with the mother's

death. On her death bed the mother says to the father-king: "If you desire to marry again after my death. I'd like you to take someone who is as beautiful as I am and who has golden hair like mine. Promise me that you will do this."'® The Grimms add the mother's dying edict, an editorial move that makes the mother the architect of her husband's desire for their daughter. After her death, the father-king grieves for his wife.

His court messengers search far and wide for a new wife, a woman who equals the dead queen's beauty, but they cannot find a replacement.

Meanwhile back at the castle, things take an explicit turn that would make

Aaron Spelling (or Sophocles) shudder. The narrator tells the reader:

Now, the king had a daughter who was just as beautiful as her dead mother, and she also had the same golden hair. When she was grown-up, the king looked at her one day and realized that her features were exactly the same as those of his dead wife. Suddenly he fell passionately in love with her and said to his

Take for instance Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment, which has been persuasively debunked by notable scholars, namely Maria Tatar and Jack Zipes, however it remains an oft-cited endorsement of the benefits of fairy tale literature for children. For an excellent critique of Bettelheim and Dundes, who both read All-Fur as the seductive daughter see Maria Tatar's preface to Off With Their Heads!: Fairy Tales and The Culture o f Childhood (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1992). Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm. The Complete Fairy Tales o f The Brothers Grimm, translated by Jack Zipes. (Toronto: Bantam, 1987; Bantam Paperback, 1992), 259 86 counselors, "I'm going to marry my daughter, for she is the living image of my dead wife."^°

The counselors find this an unsuitable pairing, and share their reluctance with the king,

who ignores their pleas. His counselors admonish, "God has forbidden a father to marry

his daughter. Nothing good can come from such a sin, and the kingdom will be brought

to ruin."^* Horrified by her father's incestuous demands, All-Fur seeks her own counsel.

To divert his amorous attentions, she challenges her father with three seemingly

impossible tasks: "Before I fulfill your wish, I must have three dresses, one as golden

as the sun, one as silvery as the moon, and one as bright as the stars. Furthermore, I

want a cloak made up of a thousand kinds of pelts and furs, and each animal in your

kingdom must contribute a piece of its skin to it." ^ o All-Fur's dismay, the father-king

meets her requests. All-Fur quickly packs the dresses of the sun and the moon and the stars into a nutshell, blackens her face and hands with soot, and escapes into the woods, wearing only the coat made of all kinds of fur and escapes into the forest.

All-Fur escapes wearing the skin of a thousand animals into the woods. She curls up within a tree until she is discovered by some huntsmen from a neighboring kingdom. The motif of shame arises again in this scene in All-Fur's attempts to conceal herself. The root of the word shame is derived from "sem" or "sham," which means to hide.^ All-Fur's desire to curl up in a tree resembles the experience of being so embarrassed you want to "curl up and die."

“ Ibid.. 260. *’ Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm. The Complete Fairy Tales of The Brothers Grimm, translated by Jack Zipes (Toronto: Bantam, 1987; Bantam Paperback. 1992). 260. " Ibid.. 260 ^ Donald Nathanson. "Shaming Systems in Couples. Families, and Institutions" in The Many Faces O f Shame, edited by Donald Nathanson (New York: The Guilford Press. 1987). 249. 87 When found by huntsmen from a neighboring kingdom, All-Fur claims herself

as orphan. She cries: "I'm just a poor girl, forsaken by my father and mother! Please

have pity on me and take me with you."^ All-Fur is taken to the castle of another king.

At the castle All-Fur lives in a little closet beneath the kitchen stairs that is "never

exposed to daylight," she carries wood, keeps the fires going, plucks the fowls, and does

all the "dirty" work. Befitting her "dirty" attire she takes on "dirty" tasks a parallel to

her shameful physical state. When asked questions All-Fur responds, "I'm good for

nothing but to have boots thrown at my head." All-Fur like most good fairy tale

heroines overcomes her humiliation by marrying a handsome prince.

Fairy tales are always complex and "All-Fur" is no exception. Explicit lessons

about heterosexual femininity appear on the surface of the text—the heroine marries a

prince and lives happily every after. At the same time, less obvious pedagogies are at

work. For instance, puberty is a particularly dangerous interval for fairy tale heroines

because their potential sexuality is always on the verge of being realized. Feminist

scholar Kay Stone points out that "it is at puberty that Rapunzel is locked in a tower,

Snow White is sent out be murdered, and Sleeping Beauty is put to sleep" (Stone, 1975, p. 47). All-Fur's pubescence portends a trial. As neither wife nor little-girl, All-Fur has outgrown her place in the family. The pedagogies about adolescent girlhood that undergird this tale can be further illustrated through a discussion of the incest taboo.

Anthropological perspectives on incest stress its relation to economics of exchange (gifts, marriage) and to pollution. The father's position or relationships with other men is contingent on what feminist anthropologist Gail Rubin terms the "traffic in

'Txçes, Complete, 261. 88 women." The father-daughter relationship is taboo presumably because the laws of

exogamy require that the daughter be undefiled currency. The adolescent daughter who

remains at home, in limbo between father and husband, embodies the sexual danger of

father-daughter incest. If, as Douglas argues, "all bodily emissions, even blood or pus

from a wound, are sources of impurity" then the adolescent daughter's menstrual blood

is material evidence of her ability to seduce the father and disrupt the family.“ Thus, it

is significant that All-Fur's father recognizes his daughter when she "grows up." The

lesson here is that the menstruating daughter is cognizant of her own sexuality. Since

she "knows" about sex, she in now culpable if the father violates her. All-Fur, then,

follows the unwritten lessons of family life. In the second half of the Grinuns' "All-

Fur," she leaves the family. Her runaway status suggests her uselessness in the

community without a man and her "untouchable" status. Her individual defilement

captured in the fur coat she wears is a visible reminder not of the father's violation but

of the daughter's wanton nature. In this way, the reader leams that the "seductive

daughter" is more dangerous than the rapacious father.^

Pollution fears, such as the idea that the pubescent daughter is a threat, often

arise in the form of sexual dangers that reveal larger social relationships. Mary

Douglas writes that "many ideas about sexual dangers are better interpreted as symbols

of the relation between parts of society, as mirroring designs of hierarchy or symmetry

“ Douglas, Purity, 35. “ An analogous example of this appears in history of family violence in Boston. Linda Gordon writes that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the victim of incest was constructed as polluted. She writes: "The pollution, moreover, was seen as contagious, not only through the transmission of venereal disease, but also as behavior 'catching' to other girls. Similarly, incest survivors often report that perpetrators "referred to them as sluts and whores, constructing an identity of the sinful woman which justified the violation of the daughter " Heroes, 49. 89 which apply in the larger social system."^ Pollution fears, then, often function to tie

men and women to particular gender roles. In this case men and women are categorized

by and through incest prohibitions, where women are defined as either wife or daughter

within a social structure that relies on heterosexual marriage (the exchange of women).

As a tool for symbolizing the social, the incest taboo illustrates the father's privilege and

the daughter's subordination as well as the belief that women are primarily sexual and

reproductive commodities.

In the prohibition schema, the breaking of a taboo usually results in punishment or a sacrifice that highlights the dangers inherent in forbidden sexual contacts. In this case, All-Fur rather than the father bears the cultural punishment. It is All-Fur who is expected to publicly mark herself as slut. The "All-Fur" tale suggests that the danger inherent in father-daughter incest is not the act itself, but in "knowing" and "telling" about it. In this way, the incest taboo arises less as a prohibition that dissuades the father from raping the daughter than as a warning to the girl about the consequences of disobeying the father. This pedagogy is further emphasized in that All-Fur’s father is never punished. Through various re-writings the Grimms edited out any punishment for the father, "a trend followed by virtually all who had a hand in producing the great nineteenth-century collections of folktales—the very collections that form the basis of tales read by and to children today."^

While All-Fur tends to be avoided in contemporary children's fairy tale collections for children, Charlotte Huck and Anita Lobel created a picture book edition

^ Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger; An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966), 4. “ Tatar, O#, 131. 90 of the tale in the late eighties, Princess Furball?'^

There is no happy ever after. There is happy on occasion an happy every once in a

while. There is happy when memories do not overcome the now.

Jane Yolen, "Allerleirauh"

In 1989 Greenwillow press published Princess Furball, a variant of "All-Fur"

written by Charlotte Huck and illustrated by Anita Lobel. In a short book chapter

entitled, "Princess Furball: The Writing, Illustrating, and Response," Huck writes that

her favorite fairy tale as a child was the story of "Furball," a tale that features "a spunky

young girl who uses her own ingenuity to change her life."^° Huck continues: "The

Grimms' version of Furball, "Allerleirauh" or "Many Furs," includes the scene in

which the father will only marry someone as beautiful as his deceased wife; he finds her when he looks upon his grown daughter. Now I knew why "Many Furs" had not appeared as a single picture-book edition."^‘In their retelling of the tale, the father promises his daughter's hand to an ogre in exchange for fifty wagons of silver. Of her decision to replace the incestuous father with an ogre Huck writes:

The decisions I faced in retelling were challenging. First of all I had to decide whether to include the incest or not. With the rise of incest in our society, one could argue that it should not be eliminated from the story. While I do believe

^ Charlotte Huck, Princess Furball, illustrated by Anita Lobel (New York: Mulberry, 1989). Charlotte Huck, "Princess Furball: The Writing, Illustrating and Response," in Battling Dragons: Issues and Controversy in Children's Literature, edited by Susan Lehr (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1995), 79. Ibid. 91 that somewhere in the sexual education of a child, he or she should learn about incest, I do not think such information should be derived from a fairy tale! Since I had found the versions that eliminated it in the retelling, I decided not to include it/^

In an article entitled "Not in This House: Incest, Denial and Doubt in the White

Middle Class Family," Elizabeth Wilson puts pressure on the cultural terms of father-

daughter incest/^ Wilson suggests that the white-middle class protects itself from the

knowledge of sexual violation within the family by projecting its anxiety about incest

onto racial and economic "others" who lack white-middle-class morality and rationality.

Sexual assault cannot happen within this middle-class family, where children are

nurtured by caring parents; if claims of incest do erupt from within the family, the

child's innate sexual desires and proclivity for fantasy become the focus of attention.

The pervasive domestic ideology of the white middle class—"Not in This House"— relegates incest's visibility to "bad" homes, deviant individuals, or sexually-precocious children. Wilson's argument suggests that Charlotte Huck finds herself writing in a context that requires the presentation of the white privileged nuclear family as stable and safe; thus, the irreproachable (if absent) parent is juxtaposed with an outsider, an ogre, who disrupts the harmonious family unit.

While Huck's re telling avoids any explicit references to the tale's incestuous antecedents, Huck and Lobel attempt to retain the "psychological truth" of the tale through Lobel's illustrations that "illuminate the psychological depths of the story.

Ibid., 80. Elizabeth Wilson, "Not in This House: Incest, Denial and Doubt in the White Middle Class Family." Yale Journal of Criticism 8 (1995) : 35-58. ^ Janet Hickman, Review of Princess Furbali by Charlotte Huck and Anita Lobel, Language Arts (March 1990) ; 306. 92 On the fourth page of the text, Furball, looks up at an imposing portrait of the ogre and

his fifty wagons of silver as she kneels in front of her father. A close look at the portrait

reveals the ogre's "resemblance to the father-king himself. Furball's dead mother,

who cannot assist her daughter, peers out from behind a curtain.

Given the rather static and passive representation of heroines within fairy tales,

some critics celebrated Princess Furball's refreshing cleverness and independence.

Furball may retain the more traditional motifs of beauty and marriage, but what

reviewers foreground is the heroine's self-reliant and assertive nature. All-Fur, for

instance, does not rely on the help of a faiiy godmother; rather, she relies on her own smarts. A reviewer for ALA Booklist writes that "Huck gracefully retells her favorite story which, despite its traditional motifs, contains some strong feminist elements. The princess is independent, practical, and clever thanks to a caring palace nurse. A review in The School Library Journal reads: "Author and illustrator have created a strong female character; particularly endearing in her coat of fur, she is resourceful and charming throughout. "^’With the exception of Jack Zipes and Janet Hickman who both note the incestuous material in the tale, reviewers dodge the terms of Fur Ball's

"spunkiness." Faced with sexual violation, the daughter must assert herself in order to survive her father's incestuous demands. What reviewers fail to note is that Fur-Ball is the victim of her father's desire and sacrificed to his entitlement within the family— whether he decides to marry her or whether he decides to "give" her to an ogre.

Huck, “Writing,” 79. ^ Review of Princess Furball, by Charlotte Huck and Antia Lobel, Booklist (September 1, 1989) : 74. ^School Library Journal. Review of Princess Furball by Charlotte Huck and Anita Lobel. (September, 1989): 240. 93 While the gendered pedagogies may have shifted in this contemporary variant to

accommodate a more rounded heroine, the burden of shame remains with the daughter,

who must recognize her father's unnatural request, and exile herself from the community. The father, although not a favorable character in the text, disappears after the beginning of the book. Furthermore, the narrative's closing sequence undermines

All-Fur's assertiveness. All-Fur remains the dutiful daughter, and fulfills the requirements of exogamous exchange. As feminist literary theorist Sandra Gilbert points out in her analysis of this tale, "the text itself discovers no viable alternative to filial resignation."^® In some sense, then, this is less a tale about a young woman's triumph than it is a tale of competition between prince and father over the body of the daughter/wife.

An even more interesting interpretative context for this book emerges in the form of angry letters that flooded Greenwillow Press after the publication of Princess

Furball. Passing over Lobel's visual allusion to father-daughter incest, disgruntled readers admonished Huck, Lobel, and Greenwillow for their portrayal of animal abuse.

One reader accused Huck and Lobel of "inducing a violent action in the minds of young children"®®; another wrote, "obviously you are hardened to the intense pain and suffering involved in fur being skinned from an animal's body to adorn a human. How ignorant and callous and barbaric to instill these hideous values in children. Given the author's note at the front of the text about the incestuous origin of the tale, it begs attention that the readers' concern ignores the daughter's abuse at her father's hands.

^«Gilbert, 276. *’ Huck, "Writing," «i. ^Ibid., 84. 94 The critiques of Princess Furball are provocative. On one hand they seem to

deny the "pain and suffering" the daughter suffers from a "callous and barbaric" father.

From this perspective, Furball emerges as the fall-girl for her father's cruelty to animals

since she "asks for it." On the other hand, the impassioned campaign to protect children

from witnessing "an obscene act of cruelty" or the "wantonly harmful" treatment of

animals may be less about animal cruelty and more about an attempt to repress

emotional material that threatens to surface. That is, the reaction to the book may be an

adaptive strategy that allows readers to protect themselves from a "return of the

repressed" or the knowledge of their own vulnerability within the family.

In response to the letters, Huck takes an interesting tack. She avoids any reference to the symbolic meaning of Furball's disguise, that the dirty fur coat signifies sexuality. Huck argues that "the letters showed no understanding for the authenticity of fairy tales or for the time setting of traditional fairy tales. Instead they applied today's values against the unnecessary killing of animals to a time period in which it was essential to kill them for food and warmth."'” This arises as a curious answer given that

Huck has already altered the "authenticity" of the tale by replacing the incestuous father with an ogre.

I point out this contradiction not to criticize Huck but to stress the cultural tensions she confronts. A discussion of the symbolism of Furball's fur-coat would require a conversation about adolescent female sexuality in general and the rapacious father in particular. Several cultural ideas would be at risk here. For instance, addressing father-daughter rape challenges the myth of the nurturing family while the

95 recognition of the father's desire for his daughter endangers the privileged place of fairy

tales on the shelves of "innocent" children. And, perhaps more dangerously, a

discussion of father-daughter rape threatens to expose the gendered pedagogies within

Princess Furball, the harmful lessons that instruct the girl that her female sexuality

invites violation. As Mary Douglas suggests: "Uncomfortable facts which refuse to be

fitted in, we find ourselves ignoring or distorting so that they do not disturb these pre-

established assumptions.""*^ Here, the investment in the father's innocence and the

nurturing family unit takes precedence over the uncomfortable knowledge of the

daughter's predicament. As a result, the possibility of subverting and/or of confronting

the misguided notion that girls and young women "invite" sexual violence vanishes with the wave of an editorial wand.

I have pointed out how the erasure or evasion of the father's crime in the

Grimms' "All-Fur" and Huck and Lobel's Princess Furball results in a gendered pedagogy that instructs the adolescent girl that her body is shamefully seductive. The

Grimms' evade the father's crime by placing the blame onto the collusive mother and the precocious daughter while Huck and Lobel protect with the father by replacing the lustful father-king with an ogre. In contrast, Kathryn Harrison defies the cultural edict that daughters should bear the crimes of the father in silence. In her contemporary fairy tale. The Kiss, Harrison details the emotional and psychological terrain of the daughter's experience, a shift in perspective that makes the father's crimes visible.

Joyce Carol Oates writes that "only in recent times has the fairy tale been reclaimed by

Ibid. Douglas, Purity, 38. 96 writers and artists for their own imaginative and frequently subversive purposes".'” For

Harrison the runaway daughter story line emerges as rich psychic material on which to

base her coming-of-age memoir. Harrison may draw on the motif of incest and the narrative sequence of betrayal and exile found in the two variants analyzed so far; however, she charts a different path out of the woods.

I posit lives for myself, other lives than the one to which I will return. Lives that begin when I don't return. There are always those stories of young women, they just never come home.

Kathryn Harrison

In The Kiss girlhood arises as a "landscape of feeling that might be continually reworked and reinterpreted. Focusing on the psychological aspects of her coming-of- age, Harrison emphasizes the social bonds that tie people together rather than more static markers— such as the age of consent—to get a grip on girlhood. As Harrison reworks the emotional landscape of her girlhood she also complicates definitions of genre and gendered childhood. If we view girlhood as "something we endlessly rework in our attempts to build an image of our own history, " then it is in this psychic space where fairy tales and memoir imbricate, where Harrison's personal memories and

Joyce Carol Oates in Mirror Mirror on the Wall: Women Writers Explore Their Favorite Fairy Tales edited by Kate Bemheimer (New York: Anchor Books, 1998), 256. Caio\ynS\eeà.man, Landscape For A Good Woman: A Story of Two lives (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1986), 128. 97 cultural myths intertwine, and where she negotiates the psychic complexity of

girlhood.**^

Harrison's dream-like narrative in The Kiss resembles the condensed format of fairy tales, a genre that foregrounds psychological conflicts. According to literary theorist Maria Tatar, "fairy tales, in particular, give us exaggerated and distorted (one might even say uncensored) forms of internal conflicts placed out in the context of family life."'** Storylines are brief and characters generic. For instance, we leam about

All-Fur's shame through her actions, what she wears, and where she goes. Through plot, rather than rich characterization, fairy tales foreground deep-seated psychological fears and fantasies. Sharing the fairy tale's surreal landscapes, over-wrought images, and uncanny happenings, Harrison's elliptical prose conveys the psychic intensity of her subject matter.

Harrison layers her memoir with familiar fairy tale elements. For instance, she asks: "Is there a way to tell a stranger that once upon a time I fell from grace, I was lost so deeply in a dark wood that I'm afraid I'll never be safe again?""*’ Harrison's allusion,

"Once upon a time...I was lost deeply in a dark wood" evokes an enchanted fairy tale setting, where ordinary time dissolves and the reader finds herself in the realm of the psychic rather than the material. Interestingly, Harrison's "I" displaces the generic third person narrator of fairy tales, signaling to the reader that this is a unique personal story in the guise of the familiar bed time narrative. This is not to suggest that Harrison's

Jacqueline Rose, The Case o f Peter Pan or The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1984), 6. Maria Tatar, "Reading Fairy Tales," in Teaching Children's Literature: Issues, Pedagogy, Resources, edited by Glenn Edward Sadler, 89-100 (New York: The Modem Language Association of America, 1992), 93. 98 memoir is in any way a make-believe story. The Kiss is first and foremost a story of

sexual trauma and emotional betrayal. Through fairy tales, Harrison achieves a multi­

layered "voice," an interpretative mix of fairy tale allusions, girlhood pedagogies, and

personal memories. It is through this "voice," an amalgam of distinct discourses and

genres, that Harrison narrates her story of sexual abuse.

In her variant of the runaway daughter narrative, Harrison reinserts the

biological mother as neither the good dead mother nor the evil (step) parent. Rather,

she presents a portrait of a vulnerable mother, who the daughter finally cannot forsake.'’®

Reminiscent of the death of All-Fur's mother, Harrison's begins her narrative by

mourning for her emotionally-distant mother. Harrison's mother closes herself off from

the world and her own daughter through a deep and death-like sleep. Harrison writes:

"Sleep makes my mother's face itself into a mask, one mask under another. She draws each breath so shallowly it seems as if she must be dying, that she might never wake.'’®

As a young girl, Harrison stands for hours at her mother's bedside, holding vigil and waiting for her to awaken. Here the fairy tale scenario of the possibly sleeping/possibly dead beauty provides a psychological subtext while at the same time Harrison changes the terms of this material, recasting herself as the hopeful suitor.

When roused from sleep her mother finds the interruption irksome and arises less a grateful sleeping beauty than an enraged one. Harrison remembers that her mother would stalk about the room upset that she had been disturbed, especially if her young daughter was the culprit. About her mother's awakenings Harrison writes:

Harrison, Kiss, 174. This analysis draws on Gilmore's reading in Trauma and Testimony of Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina. 99 "Smoke rises from her mouth, her hand. It rises slowly, dizzily, swaying back and forth

like a snake charmer's flute. Her eyes, when they turn at last toward me, are like two

empty mirrors. I can't find myself in them" (9). Evoking the imagery of enchantment,

of smoke and mirrors, Harrison captures her mother's transitory and narcissistic nature.

Harrison's mother has no interest in seeing her daughter and this neglect causes

Harrison to lose herself. Harrison writes, " for as long as my mother refuses

consciousness, she refuses consciousness of me: I do not exist. As I stand watching her

sleep I feel the world open behind me like a chasm. I know I can't step even an inch back from her bed without plummeting" (8). When Harrison is six, her mother moves out. Visiting her mother's closet after she departs, Harrison finds a collection of discarded dresses. "1 push my face into the smooth fabric, a hundred times more lovely than any other thing in this house. If a dress like this was not worth taking, how could 1 have hoped to be?" (14). The mother's abandonment and departure sets up Harrison's tale.

In "All-Fur" the daughter's body emerges as a primary preoccupation and a space where gendered pedagogies are interpreted. Similarly, Harrison's adolescent body becomes a site of contention. Harrison writes: "Like boxers, my mother and 1 back into opposing comers of the bedroom. She's always hated to be seen naked. If she can, she changes in the dark. 1 watch as she pulls her bathing suit up under her dress, wanting her to look at me, my body"(40). In an attempt to win this corporeal battle and "turn the tables" on her mother the fifteen-year-old Harrison stops eating and develops anorexia.

The attempt to reign in her desire for food arises as an attempt to contain her mourning

Harrison, Kiss, 7. 100 for her inaccessible mother. Harrison's anorexia serves as a buffer against the

knowledge of her mother's neglect. She writes: "Anorexia may begin as an attempt to

make myself fit my mother's ideal and then to erase myself, but its deeper, more

insidious and lasting seduction is that of exiling her" (39). However, in her attempt to

"exile" her mother, she develops a disease that ultimately harms herself. Anorexia

provides Harrison a safe form of vengeance, a displaced rage, that annihilates her own

body rather than her mother's.

One of the hallmarks of anorexia is the cessation of menstruation. The visible

warning sign of adolescent female sexuality, menstrual blood, disappears. In this way

the body resembles that of the more neutral category of "child," an empty frame before puberty has made its mark. Harrison notes the ties between sexuality and anorexia in the following way: " I starve myself to recapture my sexuality from my mother—not just by making my breasts and hips disappear, but by drying up the blood. The one thing she can't stand about my being so thin that I don't menstruate: I lose my capacity to get pregnant, to be in a danger of the kind that precipitated the abrupt fall from grace she endured" (41). Like All-Fur who exchanges her little girl body for a sluttish adolescent one; Harrison's emaciated body provides a visible reminder that sexuality is dangerous for a girl. The Grimms' "All-Fur" is comprehensible in part because of the assumed sexual rivalry between the seductive daughter and the collusive mother.

Harrison offers a somewhat surprising twist: it is Harrison's asexuality that taunts the mother. The lack of menstrual blood reminds Harrison's mother of her own uncontrolled sexuality that led to the shameful affair that produced a daughter. The

101 mother may be less interested in competing with her daughter for the attentions of the

father than in reclaiming her pre-adolescent state.

In an attempt to "cure" Harrison, her mother makes a series of visits to the

doctor to prod her daughter's female sexuality. On one visit to the doctor, Harrison's

mother asks the doctor to break her daughter's hymen while she watches. Harrison

writes: "This doctor deflowers me in front of my mother. Is it because he was her

obstetrician, the man who delivered me, that he imagines this is somehow all right? I lie

on the table, a paper sheet over my knees, my hands over my eyes" (43). Lying on the

doctor's table Harrison experiences profound humiliation and covers her eyes, refusing

to look and to be seen in her naked and exposed state. A year later, she attempts to commit suicide in the hopes that her "body would die along with what else was murdered on that day: girlhood, hope, any notion of being safe anywhere, with anyone"

(186). Given the gravity of this betrayal and violation it is interesting that Harrison doesn't vilify her mother; rather, she takes a different tack and underscores the girlhood pedagogies that mother and daughter share.

Harrison emphasizes the point where her mother's girl-rearing experience intersects with her own. Like an heirloom, gendered lessons pass from mother to daughter. Harrison writes about the nurturing relationship she shared with her grandfather and how that bond was truncated when she went through puberty. About her grandfather's rejection of her, Harrison observes: "When he hugged me, he didn't let our bodies touch, he made sure that my breasts and hips didn't press against him. I suppose the same thing must have happened to my mother when she turned twelve or thirteen, her flesh announcing to him that she had become sexual and therefore

102 untouchable, and that his rejection as she slipped from childhood into womanhood must

have wounded her as it did me" (60). Harrison and her mother both receive a lesson in

shame when they hit puberty.

In contrast to the common assumption that parents raise their children in accordance with their personal values, Harrison suggests how normative ideas about gender weave themselves into everyday girl-rearing practices. Camouflaged within the

"private" space of the family, the cultural pedagogy that female sexuality is dangerous and dirty transforms into a pedagogy about the girl’s personal defilement. When handed down in this way, in the context of loving attachments, pedagogies about girlhood are particularly salient. In particular, Harrison pinpoints how her passage from girl to woman is formed through a psychological pedagogy through which she 1 earns that her mother's shame is hers as well. It may be that the girl's fundamental "wound" is not that she lacks a penis, as Freud would have it, but that she suffers harm when her pubescent body is rejected. *

“ Freud placed children's sexuality at the center of the family drama. In particular, Freud's shifting theories about the daughter's sexual development exemplify the displacement of the father's incestuous desire onto the daughter. In "The Aetiology of Hysteria" (1896) Freud offered his "seduction" theory. In this paper, he proposed that hysterical symptoms were a result of childhood sexual abuse. His patients, mostly well-to-do women, had repressed the trauma of childhood sexual assault within the unconscious, and their hysterical symptoms were the result of memories operating unconsciously. Freud renounced his seduction thesis in favor of the Oedipus complex, in which he used the myth of Oedipus to explain the child's sexual development. In this model, infantile sexuality leads to the Oedipus complex. The child harbors an unconscious incestuous desire for the parent of the opposite sex and feelings of aggression and rivalry for the same-sex parent. Freud theorized that when the young girl realizes that she lacks a penis, she suffers a deep narcissistic wound. This absence or "lack" then forms the daughter's aggressive feelings towards her mother. Turning to the father as the idealized lover, the daughter wishes to have his child which is, in Freud's terms, a symbolic penis. For the daughter, normative femininity requires the daughter's recognition of her lack and the acceptance of her passivity. Freud's theorization of sexual abuse serves to privilege the adult's version of the story, which transfers the burden of shame onto the daughter, who must silently tolerate her father's sexual advances.

103 Underscoring how seemingly private girl-rearing experiences are related to

larger cultural ideas about girlhood, such as the inherent danger of adolescent female

sexuality, Harrison dislodges the collusive mother. That is, through a focus on the

pedagogical material she and her mother ingest as young women, Harrison challenges

familiar narratives about father-daughter incest. While it is often assumed that the

father's violation of the daughter ruptures the mother-daughter bond, Harrison provides

a representation of an ambivalent mother-daughter relationship that anticipates the

incestuous father. In Harrison's tale mother and daughter are both wounded; they are

survivors, if you will, of destructive gendered pedagogies. When Harrison releases her mother from blame within her memoir, she opens up the possibility that girlhood pedagogies rather than a conspiring mother prepare the daughter for the father's violation.

How can it be that I am twenty years old, that I've had to grow up without a father, only to meet him now when it's too late, when childhood is over, lost?

Kathryn Harrison

Like All-Fur, Harrison's father pays little attention to his daughter until she matures. Harrison meets her father for the third time when he comes for a brief visit.

Harrison is twenty years old and an adult in legal terms. However, she describes herself as a "girl", a label that underscores her position as daughter in a network of family relationships. When Harrison picks up her father at the airport for a visit she writes; "The girl my father sees has blond hair that falls past her waist, past her hips; it

104 falls to the point at which her fingertips would brush her thighs if her arms were not

crossed before her chest. I'm no longer very thin—away at school I've learned to eat—

but, as if embarrassed to be caught with a body, I hide whatever I can of it" (52). Like

All-Fur's coat of animal skins Harrison's long hair is ambiguous. It represents both her

potential sexuality and her attempt to hide her female body so that she may remain a

"girl".

During this visit father, mother and adult daughter are reunited. In the world of fairy tales, the triad of mother, daughter, and father rarely holds. Similarly, Harrison's family is quickly disrupted when the father casts a horrible spell on his daughter. In a pivotal scene in the book, Harrison and her father wait in the terminal for his return flight to be called. As the father boards the plane, he surprises Harrison with a sexual kiss. She writes: "A voice over the public-address system announces the final boarding call for my father's flight. As I pull away, feeling the resistance of his hand behind my head, how tightly he holds me to him, the kiss changes. It is no longer a chaste, close­ lipped kiss. My father pushes his tongue deep into my mouth: wet, insistent, exploring, then withdrawn" (68). Harrison's reluctance is evident in her description of her father's forceful grip and her attempt to pull away from him. Harrison writes: "In years to come. I'll think of the kiss as a kind of transforming sting, like that of a scorpion: a narcotic that spreads from my mouth to my brain. The kiss is a sleep, to surrender volition, to become paralyzed. It's the drug my father administers in order that he might consume me. That I might desire to be consumed" (70). Whereas a kiss often awakens

For an in depth analysis of the connections between hair and sexuality see Warner, Beast. 105 the fairy tale heroine into marriage and heterosex, this paternal one places the daughter

under a horrible spell.

With his kiss Harrison's father casts a magic spell, one that propels Harrison

into a different realm, where time and place are insignificant, where she is "out of time

as well as place" (1). Magic spells in fairy tale literature often transform the character

and her entire universe, transporting the heroine to an unreal place that symbolizes less

a material realm than a psychological one. The airport serves as a fitting contemporary

scene for Harrison's metaphorical departure "into the woods." Harrison enters the dark forest a girl who emerges a year later as a woman. As Harrison puts it: "I have embarked on a peculiar passage in my life—a time out of real time, one which will not fit either into the life I lived as a child or the one I create as a woman, but which will carry me, like a road, from one to the other" (102).

Under her father's spell, Harrison begins the process of exiling herself from her everyday activities by dropping out of school. She leaves behind a college curricula for more salient educational material. Harrison's father informs her: "Everyone will have to understand that for now I am your school. I am what you have to leam" (81). Not until it is too late, and her disenchantment is complete, will Harrison realize that she has already learned the lessons her father offers. Her grandfather taught her how to disassociate from an unruly female body and her mother's abandonment schooled her in exposure and betrayal. That Harrison's girl-rearing experiences resurface throughout her adult life suggests how girlhood resists closure. This point is further demonstrated through the way Harrison jumps back and forward through time, juxtaposing her current relationship with her father alongside the lessons of her girlhood.

106 For instance, Harrison describes the first night her father stays overnight through

a vignette from her childhood. As a young child Harrison's maternal grandmother's

Persian cat has a litter of kittens. Her grandmother asks Harrison not to touch the

kittens until their eyes open. But as in fairy tale literature, prohibitions are made to be

broken, and one day after school Harrison transgresses her grandmother's rule. Her

violation of the baby cats is reminiscent of an earlier scene in which she pries open the

eyes of her mother who refuses to look at her. Harrison writes: "I didn't know why, I

knew only that I couldn't stop myself. I couldn't bear to see their always sleeping faces,

their tiny eyes that never woke to me. For a week, longer. I'd held their beating, blind life in my hands, and I'd felt my heart squeezed in my chest. I'd felt as if I were dying."

The kittens provide a substitute object for Harrison's curiosity and hostility toward her mother, and portend how she and her father will trespass the incest taboo. Harrison ignores her grandmother's prohibition and opens the first kitten's eyes. "My heart was pounding and I was sweating with fear, but I accomplished the violation gently. The kitten made no sound, it did not struggle. What I did hadn't seemed to cause it any pain" (90). Harrison uses this scene from her childhood, the violation of the cats, to foreshadow how her father will violate her in a way that appears innocuous but will have lasting consequences.

The scene also lays out what her father seems to offer. In contrast to the kittens and her mother, who refuse to "see" her, the father holds the potential to give Harrison what she most desires, a loving attachment. Harrison's fascination with her father revolves around images of seeing and being seen. Her father takes dozens of pictures of her. Harrison writes: "I don’t know it yet, not consciously, but I feel it; my father,

107 holding himself so still and staring at me, has somehow begun to see me into being.

His look gives me to myself, his gaze reflects the life my mother's willfully shut eyes

denied. Looking at him looking at me, I cannot help but fall painfully, precipitously in

love" (63). What Harrison discovers later is that like his kiss, the father's "enraptured"

and "spellbound" gaze is also part of his horrible enchantment. The father's vision is

clouded by his desire for Harrison's body, and he uses his eyes to assess the emotional

vulnerability his daughter exudes. In the end the father's "spellbinding" eyes will

expose rather than nurture Harrison.

Harrison's father, like the father-king in "All-Fur" and Princess Furball is a man of social standing. He is a minister. Harrison writes: "Man of god is how someone describes my father to me. I don't remember who. Not my mother. I'm young enough that I take the words to mean he has magical properties and that he is good, better than other people" (11). When Harrison's father finally suggests that Harrison sleep with him, he relies on his position as a religious man. In the following scene Harrison's father articulates his sexual intentions:

"It's dusk when he finally says it. The canyon is dark. The canyon is a river of blood, because when my father says the words I've dreaded—"make love" is the expression he uses—God's heart bursts, it breaks. For me it does."

"God gave you to me," he says.

Here the father's "private" ownership of his daughter and his decision to use her as he sees fit is safeguarded through "public" practices. For instance, popular biblical references provide Harrison's father with several examples to justify his claim, "God gave you to me." He might have cited the wanton Eve or Lot's daughters who seduce

108 their sleeping father. In this way, religious much like legal, and psychiatric views of

incest are based on the seductive daughter and/or the collusive mother. Harrison learns

a girlhood lesson: the daughter's body is the father's property and his privilege is woven

throughout the everyday practices and discourses of social institutions such as the

church that purport to shield girls and women from harm.

Harrison underscores the depth of her father's betrayal and her crises of faith

through a girlhood memory of her attempt to convert to Catholicism. Harrison remembers that she consistently failed to answer one of the questions necessary for confirmation. When the priest asks her "What is it that becomes the body and blood of

Christ?", Harrison responds: "Bread and water," I said every time, substituting prisoner's fare for the holy meal of the Eucharist" (112). Harrison's inability to name wine and wafer through her evocation of "prisoner's fare" suggests a crisis of faith, one related to a disbelief in her father, who is himself a man of god. Female spirituality within the Christian tradition has often been expressed in relationship to food.

Brumberg notes that "in the medieval period fasting was fundamental to the model of female holiness. The medieval woman's capacity for survival without eating meant that she found other forms of food; Prayer provided sustenance, as did the Christian

Eucharist—the body and blood of Christ—ingested as wafer and wine.^^ The juxtaposition of the relationship between virgin-saint and the Divine-Father contrasts sharply with the relationship between Harrison and her natural father, and her realization that the father-daughter bind she experiences offers not sustenance but emptiness. She writes: "My flesh, starved and lifeless under his, how eloquently it says

109 what I cannot; I'm hungry, and I’m dead. Dead in allegiance to my mother, and dead to

him as well. Dead in response to his using his big body to separate me from the world"

(187).

In retrospect Harrison sees her father's faulty logic: "The words that might send

most people running are the very words to trap me. God gave you to me. Does my

father believe this? He convinces me that he does, that I am his by ordained right, his to

do with what he wants. " (109). Harrison keeps the knowledge of her father's intentions

from herself, hoping that he will come to his senses.® Harrison's self-deception can be

interpreted as a psychic necessity. Her blindness to her father's deception arises as a

complex psychological response that allows her to avoid acknowledging the reality of

her father's betrayal. Harrison experiences what feminist psychologist Jennifer Freyd

describes as betrayal blindness, " the systematic filtering of reality in order to maintain

human relationships. It is the not knowing and not remembering the betrayals of

everyday life and everyday relationships in order to protect those relationships."^ It is

safer for Harrison to accept her father's skewed rationale, than it is to face the danger of

losing her newly-discovered father. Harrison remains with the father not out of some

unconscious incestuous desire for him, but out of a need to protect herself and retain the

affective ties between father and daughter.

Harrison's enchantment is complete when her father finally rapes her. About

this initial violation Harrison writes: "The sight of him naked: at that point I fall

Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Fasting Girls: The History of Anorexia Nervosa (New York: Plume, 1989), 42. ® Dymphna is the patron saint of mental illness. ^ Jennifer Freyd, Betrayal Trauma: The Logic of Forgetting Childhood Abuse (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 193. 110 completely asleep. I arrive at the state promised by the narcotic kiss in the airport. In years to come, I won’t be able to remember even one instance of our lying together "

(136). Harrison's inability to remember the exact details of her father's violation is representative of post-traumatic memories. Here, Harrison separates herself from the violation she experiences through diassociation. She describes the mind/body split in the following way; "This flesh, I tell myself, means nothing. You are not a body, but a heart, a mind, a soul. These are yours and no one can take them from you" (177).

Finally, Harrison enters into a "psychic" sleep that resembles death. She hides in her underground apartment crouched between her bed and the wall; " sometimes 1 fall asleep there, my arms around my knees, my body curled tight (116). Like All-Fur who hides in the hollow of a tree, Harrison curls up in her apartment in the fetal position, suggesting a desire to reclaim her position as asexual child.

In the next section of The Kiss, Harrison offers a provocative resolution to the runaway daughter narrative. Harrison does not wait for, nor does she assertively seek prince. Refusing to sacrifice herself for the father, Harrison overcomes him and returns as a single woman to her mother, her home.

I l l The clock strikes midnight, and my mother and I exchange a solemn kiss.

Kathryn Harrison

The solemn kiss that mother and daughter share foreshadows Harrison's disenchantment. In her departure from the forest Harrison heads not for another kingdom but to the domestic scene of her girlhood. Harrison finds herself heading home when her mother and her grandfather fall ill. Harrison writes: "They both die slowly, and as they do I return to them, and to my grandmother" (181). The mortality of her grandfather and mother bring her back from an enchanted realm into a material one. As she kneels beside her dying grandfather who loved her as a young girl, she kisses him: "Though I've courted and teased death, played irresponsibly with my life, 1 never believed in my own mortality until 1 sat beside my grandfather's cold body, touched and smelled and embraced it. All along, it was my unbelief that made my recklessness possible. The hour 1 spend with my grandfather, kneeling by the long drawer, changes my life. The kiss 1 place on his unyielding cheek begins to wake me, just as my father's in the airport put me to sleep" (190). Her grandfather's death sparks the realization of her own physicality, and Harrison wakes herself with her own kiss.

Her awakening may begin at her grandfather's side, but it is her mother's death that finally breaks her father's spell.

Harrison's journey home is both a literal return and psychological one. Harrison reconnects with her mother and in turn reconnects with her own flesh. As her mother dies of cancer Harrison communicates her betrayal through the body. In a final act of reparation, Harrison cuts off her long hair. Harrison writes: "Having my hair cut off

112 and then giving it to my mother is a complex act, one with layers of meaning. There are

things I need to tell my mother before she dies, before she leaves me; and I speak, as I

always have, with the body she gave me, the one she carried inside her" (195). Harrison

mourns for and returns to that pre-oedipal state, where mother and daughter

communicate through the female body. Harrison closes her narrative in the same way

she began it, with an image of a daughter standing beside her mother's body. Now that

her mother is dead she is free to touch the body her mother denied her in life. Harrison

writes: "I touch her chest, her arms, her neck; I kiss her forehead and her fingertips; I

lay my warm cheek against her cold one; and, as I do, something drops away from me: that slick, invisible, impenetrable wall. Whatever it was that separated me from my life, from the life I had before I met my father—the remains of what was built in an instant by his long-age kiss—comes suddenly down." The body that gave birth to Harrison is also the body that mediates her re-birth.

Harrison's return to her mother disrupts more familiar storylines in which the daughter is sacrificed in order to protect the father. In contrast to All-Fur and Princess

Furball who both marry princes (a surrogate father), and Dymphna who is sacrificed for the father, Harrison returns the father to his place on the periphery of the mother- daughter relationship. Harrison highlights this feminist spin on the runaway daughter narrative when she writes: "How surprised I am, years later, when I see the altarpiece of the Church of Saint Dympna in Gheel, Belgium. Sculpted by Jan Van Wavre in the early sixteenth century, Dympna's father cuts off her hair, a long blond tail of it, as much like my own as a statue's could be. Except that I don't let my father have that hair, or my life" (196).

113 The extent to which Harrison shifts the gendered pedagogies within this tale is

evident in the heated scandal that surrounded the publication of The Kiss. Kathryn

Harrison and her book were the subject of op-ed pieces in The New York Times and The

Wall Street Journal, and the topic of interest in magazines like Vanity Fair. With some

exceptions, critics scrambled to protect Harrison's father: John Yardley from the

Washington Post describes Harrison as the seductive and "not unwilling" daughter and

writes that The Kiss is a "shameful book, which exploits the private life of the author's

family.Another critic tells Harrison to "hush-up."^ Because Harrison doesn't

sacrifice herself for the father by dying or getting over it her veracity is questioned.

For instance, a commentator for The New York Times writes, "in the end, the mystery

of her healthy survival remains a flaw in her memoir."

It is interesting to note that while the son's fight with and alienation from the

father fits the paradigm of male coming-of-age narratives, the independent daughter,

who disobeys the father is an unfamiliar character. In her study of the literary

representation of the daughter-father dyad, Lynda Boose writes that the detached daughter "engenders a vision of social inversion that must be vehemently quashed within the fiction, if allowed to enter the cultural canon at all The critiques aimed at

Harrison's book suggest that her inversion of key elements and pedagogies in the runaway daughter narrative hits a cultural nerve.

Jonathan Yardley, "Thanks For the Memoirists," The Washington Post (Apr. 14,1997): D2. “ Cynthia Crossen, "Know Thy Father," Review of The Kiss, by Kathryn Harrison, Wall Street Journal (March 4, 1997): A 16. ^ Boose, Lynda E. "The Father's House and The Daughter In It." In Fathers and Daughters edited by Lynda E. Boose and Betty S. Flowers, 19-74 (Baltimore: John Hopkins University, 1989), 34.

114 Most significantly, Harrison parts company with All-Fur and Princess Furball

when she refuses to heed the cultural lesson that the pubescent daughter is culpable and

responsible for her father's sexual advances. Theories of father-daughter incest tend to

focus on the vulnerability of the little-girl rather than on the adolescent or "adult"

daughter.® This construction of incest requires an innocent victim, the little girl who

grows up and leaves the harm of the abuse behind her when she leaves her father's

house. The little girl who needs protection from an adult reiterates the adult-child power

relationship. In this cultural equation the sexual innocent doesn't register the father's

violation as "sex." If the violation of the daughter requires her sexual innocence then the

adolescent or adult daughter becomes a slippery figure. The mature daughter "knows"

about sexuality and should recognize her seductive power over the father and take the

responsibility for resisting that abuse. The cultural pedagogy here is unequivocal: the mature daughter, and Harrison in particular, is "old enough to know better."

In The Kiss, Harrison jars the sexually unaware little girl from her central role and replaces her with an adult daughter. By refusing to reduce incest to merely a physical act between little girl and adult male, Harrison suggests that girlhood may be less about chronological markers, such as the age of consent, than about necessary attachments and the psychological and emotional ties that bind people together.

Harrison reorganizes the boundaries of girlhood to make room for the psychological territory that the mature daughter never leaves behind. Similarly, Vikki Bell and other feminist theorists argue that the crime of incest is less about the daughter's age than

® For example see Jacobs, Janet Leibman Jacobs, Victimized Daughters: Incest and The Development Of The Female Self (New York: Routledge, 1994).

115 about the "wrong of incest as sexual abuse related to the gendered power dynamics of a

male-dominated society that depicts women and children as possessions of the male."®

In this way, Harrison offers a feminist interpretation of father-daughter incest: regardless of her age, Harrison is raped by her father. In The Kiss Harrison subverts the familiar terms of father-daughter incest and offers a revised tale that shifts attention away from the seductive daughter and the collusive mother to the rapacious father, a mover that disturbs the silence around the cultural practice of incest.

“ Vikki Bell, Interrogating Incest: Feminism, Foucault and the Law (London: Routledge, 1993), 140.

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