Erica L. Walters – Childcare Professional

The Female Adolescent Body As A Site of Resistance (2010)

The separation between fiction for children and that for young adults lies in the representations of power within the narrative.  The leap from the comfort-based literature of childhood to the discomfort and struggle in Young Adult (YA) literature is one which gives fertile ground for literary analysis in the psycho-social implications of the literature we as a culture expect and at times require our adolescents to consume.  Adolescents must struggle within and against a larger culture, against family, religion, academic and other power structures, and must gain some insight into their own role within power to qualify as a Entwicklungsroman, a novel of development.  Two recent novels, both written by adult women, localize this process on the bodies of their female adolescent protagonists, creating narratives in which the markedly feminine (and at times feminist) actions which they take to control their bodies reflect their struggle against the wider culture in which they are coming of age.  Laurie Halse Anderson’s contemporary novel Wintergirls explores the damaged psyche and life threatening eating disorder of its protagonist, Lia.  In Bumped, writer Megan McCafferty creates a not-too-distant-future world in which adults are almost universally infertile – a world in which teenaged identical twins Melody and Harmony make decisions about sexuality and pregnancy which are informed by and affect their culture as a whole.  In both of these novels, the characters’ bodies reflect their resistance to power structures in a repressive environment.

Laurie Halse Anderson’s novels are notoriously metafictional, “drawing attention to [their] status as an artifact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality,” mainly through textual manipulation which intends to portray the inner psyche of the narrating character (Waugh 2).  Meta text describes literature which draws attention to itself as an artifact of fiction, or is “self conscious.”  By using nontraditional formatting, Anderson reminds the reader that the book is a text, but she avoids the hackneyed style of an epistolary or diary entry format.  Rather, the protagonist’s journey in Wintergirlsis an internal monologue represented through metatextual methods.  Newly eighteen year-old Lia describes the car crash which resulted from her driving while malnourished as “::Marshmallow/air/explosion/bag::” (Anderson 8).  The treatment process Lia’s parents force upon her Lia describes as “…I started coming here after the first prison  clinic stay because Dr. N. Parker is a scam artist specialist in crazy teenagers troubled adolescents” (ellipses and italics in original), using metatext to create within the novel a clarity that this is a representation of Lia’s inner life, of her thinking process and, eventually, her descent into madness (Anderson 114).  By establishing this novel as a process for its character rather than the observation of unfolding events, Anderson creates an artifact which allows the reader to perceive Lia’s struggles in real-time, and thus her resistance to power structures becomes that much more crucial and the possibility of death more real.  Lia faces common contemporary struggles – those against parents, the banality of school, and abandonment by her longtime best friend Cassie (first through ostracism, then through Cassie’s death from bulimia related causes), but the metatextual treatment given by Anderson gives these struggles an edge and reality which makes Lia’s resistance more valid.

The power structures which Lia resists lie mostly in the reorganization of her family following her father’s infidelity and her parents’ divorce.  Lia holds a dear affection for her stepsister, Emma, and somewhat indifferent tolerance for her stepmother Jennifer.  If, as Roberta Seelinger Trites claims in Distrubing the Universe: Power and Repression in Young Adult Literature, adolescent literature functions as an artifact composed of words in irony against the reality of young adults not “knowing the words,” and struggling to exist within an adult code of behavior which they do not yet understand, then Lia’s anorexia and self mutilation are her resistance to the demand that she try (Trites 21).  Lia resists the expectation from her parents that she be a perfect young woman and fill their well-defined mold of what she will become.  Her flashbacks to childhood, many of which center on her enjoying both food and her family (precisely the two things she is unable to enjoy at the time of the novel), begin with “when I was a real girl,” separating her life into pre-anorexia and post-anorexia.  Lia’s life dissolves from what she has always known, and through manipulation of her body she attempts to exert some modicum of control.

In YA fiction, self-mutilation becomes representative of “claiming” a body and simultaneously of calling out for a body to be seen (McGee and Miskec 175).  By mutilating her body through cutting and starvation, Lia asks her parents to both recognize her autonomy and to see her.  At a climax of the novel, when Lia recognizes that she could easily kill her weakened body with a knitting needle, Lia steps mentally outside of her bodily obsession to state for herself what her family will not state for her: a voicing of her autonomy and a plea to be seen as an individual.  One imagines that Lia is silent when she says “My name is Lia.  My mother is Chloe, my father is David.  And sister, Emma.  And Jennifer.  My mother can put her hands inside the open chests of strangers and fix their broken hearts, but she doesn’t know what music I like.  My father things I am eleven.  His wife keeps her promises.  She brought me a sister who is waiting for me to come home and play.  My name is Lia” (Anderson 266).  Lia is silent because she is most likely in the process of total organ failure while she sits alone in the same motel where her best friend died months before.  But by merely thinking these words, and by claiming her name and seeing her family clearly and with balanced compassion, Lia severs herself from the need to resist their power through the manipulation of her own body.  “There is a chance I might want to live, after I get some sleep” Lia thinks, and thus begins the not insignificant denouement of the novel in which she begins to work within the power structure of institutionalized treatment and family talk therapy, but not without her own demands.  Though she states she engages in “no games this time, no midnight exercise parties in the shower for me.  No dumping my food in the plants or sticking it in my underwear…I avoid the drama of the girls still neck-deep in the snow, running away from the pain as fast as they can.  I hope they figure it out,” Lia still reserves the right to “argue with doctors because I don’t believe in their brand of magic, not a hundred percent, and it’s something I need to talk about” (Anderson 275-276).  Lia is able to achieve health and the promise of happiness when she finds her place within the power structure of her family and society on her own terms, rather than issuing a blanket rejection of all of its demands.  After years of using her body as a site of resistance, Lia begins to see it as simply her, when the need for resistance disappears.  

In contrast to the contemporary setting of Wintergirls, Megan McCafferty’s Bumped follows a typical dystopian near-future pattern complete with clever technological imaginings and extrapolating the plausible outcome of current trends and mores.  In the America of McCafferty’s imagining, near universal infertility affects men and women over the age of eighteen as a result of a virus that appears to have no other ill effects.  In Vitro fertilization is also unviable.  The novel rests on a twist on the value placed on teenage sexuality, opening with an excerpt from a State of the Union Address by the fictional America’s President: “The United States of America once ranked above all industrialized nations in the realm of teen pregnancy.  We were the undisputed queens of precocious procreation!  We were number one before, and we can be number one again!” (McCafferty epigraph).  The novel begins with modern, beautiful teenager Melody, who was adopted by her successful and ambitious parents as an infant, shopping in a “Mallplex” with her newly discovered identical twin sister Harmony, who unexpectedly showed up on Melody’s doorstep just days prior.  Harmony was also adopted, but unlike Melody grew up in an ultra-conservative, isolationist Christian sect known as Goodside.  Harmony tells herself that her mission is to stop her newfound sister from “bumping,” the contemporary term for having sex with another teenager in order to give an adult couple a child, usually for profit.  Melody, in turn, shows a vague repulsion toward her sister, but also demonstrates some resistance to the expectation that she breed as soon as possible.

The obsession with teenage procreation is so ingrained in this society that the music playing at the mall cloyingly endorses bumping, with lyrics such as “You’re knocked up / Ready to pop / Due to drop / Do the deed / born to breed” (italics in original) (McCafferty 1).  Stores sell faux pregnant bellies to be worn as fashion accessories, and the most popular club at Melody’s high school is the Pro/Am Pregg Alliance, which unites both “professional” and amateur teenage girls who have children for older couples.  Condoms are illegal and a pregnancy in a teenager, whether planned or unplanned, is cause for celebration and esteem among both the teen’s peers and adults.  In contrast, in Harmony’s home of Goodside, children are married at around twelve years old and also expected to breed, but only within the context of a church-sanctioned marriage.  The extreme dichotomy of mainstream America’s free-market and commercialized approach to the changing value of teenage sexuality in response to the virus and Goodside’s hypermoral and reactionary one sets up opportunities for these very different but physically identical young women to rebel by using their bodies in ways which their respective cultures categorically condemn.  

Melody’s upbringing is our own contemporary America’s attitude toward teenage sexuality and autonomy in different clothing.  Michel Foucault argues that by making sex “forbidden” and something to be hidden and ashamed of, we actually receive the pleasure of talking about how much we cannot talk about it (35).  This is relevant in studies of YA fiction’s representation of adolescent sexuality since the novels are almost invariably written by adults for adolescents, and therefore carry the discourse of adult-speaking-to-child through the omnipotence of the author.  In Melody’s culture, the pleasure of adults saying “no” to children’s sexuality is replaced by an overt commodification of the adolescent body.  Roberta Seelinger Trites invokes Foucault when writing about the purpose of an adult writer about teenage sexuality, claiming he “might argue that adults enjoy lecturing to adolescents about sexuality because it gives the adult power and a certain sexual pleasure, the scintillation present in the act of forbidding” (95).  This scintillation is satisfied in Melody’s America by the careful control of adolescent sexuality, focused on encouraging procreation rather than forbidding it, but with the same level of disregard for autonomy and lack of faith in the adolescent as an individual. 

Melody’s adoptive parents hire an agent to ensure she gets the best contract for her genes and reproductive capability, and approach the cultivation of her value as a “bumper” with the same stringent control they do for her college applications.  When she signs up with UGenXX Talent agency, Melody says “right away, I started getting major swag from the most affluential couples desperate for me to make a healthy delivery” at age thirteen (38).  Melody is an anomaly at age sixteen because she has not given birth, though she has a contract with a family, the Jaydens, which promises her a six-figure compensation, a car, and college tuition upon the birth of a healthy baby.  To complete the absolute control and commodification adults practice over teenagers’ sexualities, Melody’s “bumping” partner cannot be of her own choosing.  She is selected to breed with the very famous and extremely in-demand professional breeder Jondoe.  Melody resists this culturally enviable matchup based on her feelings for her friend Zen, who is too short to be viable as a professional breeding partner.  By valuing her feelings for Zen, Melody resists the control of a society which cannot and will not allow her body to be used for her own purposes, but instead supplies her with both a cultural moral mandate and immense compensation for engaging in an act from which she derives no pleasure.  By stalling, Melody essentially stakes her claim to her own body and resists the control of her culture and parents. 

Melody marks her body as a site of resistance, a resistance the pleasure and danger of which become apparent in an interaction with Zen.  Zen expresses jealousy of the possibility of Melody breeding with Jondoe, a feeling which is so against the more of breeding-as-patriotism that at first Melody is shocked.  She narrates “I want to ask, as jealous as I get whenever I hear rumors about you taking up with another everythingbut? But I can’t” (italics in original) (287).  The basic fact of their jealousy is forbidden, just as Zen is relegated to the role of “everythingbut” the slang term for someone who is unsuitable for breeding and therefore can engage in “everything but” actual intercourse.  When Zen shows Melody the illegal condom he has procured, their feelings become a radical resistance against the restrictiveness of their culture.  Though their intimacy is interrupted, the intention of having sex for something other than procreation marks both Zen’s and Melody’s bodies as sites of resistance.  In this culture, teenage feelings are still dismissed and devalued, even as their reproductive capabilities are given extreme market value.  

If Melody must resist her upbringing and culture bodily by refusing sex with Jondoe, it is the well planned irony that her twin sister Harmony must resist her upbringing by engaging in the very act which Melody refuses.  Harmony’s upbringing is the extrapolation of our own contemporary phenomenon of radical right-wing Christianity.  In her article “Sex, Sin, and Social Policy,” Susan Rose claims that the Religious Right’s purpose in abstinence-only education is to preserve patriarchal power structures which “privilege men’s rights over women’s rights and parent’s rights over children’s rights” and that it is more about subjugating women’s power and desires than it is about a concrete morality (1214).  Thus it flows naturally that Harmony’s rebellion would involve experiencing desire for that which she has been raised to resist, that is, a man who is not her husband, and sex for the sake of pleasure and affection.  Harmony twists the order which she has been raised to value, by running away from her adoptive parents and then by taking a position of control and desire in her sexual experience with Jondoe.  She has run away from her church sanctioned husband and becomes pregnant by Jondoe, who has also fallen in love with her.  Harmony’s body becomes a site of pleasure for her, and by using it thusly she resists the constraints of her repressive upbringing within the context of the equally oppressive wider world.  That both twins resist power structures by claiming the value of their own feelings and sexual desire is significant in a genre which exists partially to preserve the hierarchy of adults over adolescents.  That both twins use their bodies to do this creates a novel which values the adolescent body as a focal point for subversive resistance.  

Laurie Halse Anderson and Megan McCafferty create in their novels works which simultaneously value teenage autonomy while existing within the very oppressive cultural psycho-structure which devalues it as a rule.  Their works are valuable for the ways in which teenage girls, whose bodies are the subject of hugely oppressive power structures (via marketing, sexual violence, lack of genuine discourse, and general stripping of autonomy) in reality, claim their increasing role within these power structures inside the confines of their respective novels.  Lia’s struggles with anorexia and self mutilation bring her to a place where she can claim a role of power and near-equality within her family.  In Bumped, Melody and Harmony claim the ultimate taboo – sex for the sake of pleasure and self expression via the adolescent body.  Though the novels are both written by adults, the compassion and complexity with which their authors approach the bodies of their protagonists display a subversive and largely successful attempt to create sites of resistance on and within the bodies of these adolescent young women.