Overview/Purpose
The female body has long been contested space in the pages of young adult literature.
Susan Bordo (2003) states that in feminist literature the body is used as a medium, “…a steady
motif…of pathology as embodied protest – unconscious, inchoate, and counterproductive protest
without an effective language, voice, or politics, but protest nonetheless.” Young women
struggling with societal demands will starve and carve their bodies to fit those demands, unaware
perhaps that it is a “counterproductive protest.” If we consider the body as a text in the same
manner as we would graffiti or e-mail, it presents itself as readable and analyzable. The Western
image of the female body in media and literature position women in a powerless, passive role
that is difficult, if not impossible to attain (Harrison & Canto, 1997; Bessengoff, 2006).
Characters in young adult literature often believe that society has written its views upon
their bodies. They struggle to adhere to its standards, often in self-destructive methods, because
they fear such standards are unattainable. Norms of female beauty (e.g., thinness and clear skin)
are linked to idealized versions of women. Feminist readings of these texts allow us to locate
and undermine these socially constructed views. Our presentation will, first, examine YAL
novels dealing with texts wherein the protagonists seem to be struggling with laws written upon
them, i.e., socially constructed norms of acceptable body images. Transitioning from there, we
will examine YAL texts in which the protagonist uses her own body to write her story because
words fail her. The young girl who cuts her body in order to demand attention because no one
will listen; the teen who considers to physically change her appearance to appeal to the Western
society’s standards of beauty. Novels like Alice Hoffman’s Green Angel and Laurie Halse
Anderson’s Wintergirls have protagonists who cut themselves, while characters in Anderson’s
Speak and The Impossible Knife of Memory remain mute or socially isolated in order to resist
dealing with the aftermath of a traumatizing event. To analyze these texts we turned to a trauma
theory lens.
We utilize both trauma and feminist theories in an effort to ascertain how characters in young
adult novels use their bodies as texts. We also analyze how adolescents in young adult novels
not only view their bodies as needing to reach society’s standard of beauty but to determine how
their bodies are newly constructed, albeit traumatically, in an effort to respond to traumatic
events in their lives. The trauma in their lives are considered insurmountable; thus, they respond
by employing methods that cause additional trauma such as the use of starvation and cutting.
Conducting a literary analysis of young adult novels using trauma and feminist theories, helps us
to use lenses that probe young adult’s wounds and their witnessing of trauma that they
experience.
Research Questions


What tropes, narrative structures/conventions are commonly found in YAL trauma
novels?
How is the protagonist’s body used as a text in young adult literature?
Theoretical Framework
The intersection of feminist and trauma theories, though not always paired, seems to us an
excellent partnership in this study. Writing in 1996, noted trauma theorist Kali Tal stated,
“[Trauma theory] overlaps with [feminist, African-American, and queer] literature so that
distinct sub-genres of literature of trauma may be found in each of these communities.” We
propose to use both these lenses because we see a trend in YAL writers moving from inscribing
societal concerns upon their protagonists’ bodies to having their main characters use their bodies
to write a traumatizing event.
Literature Review
Though long associated with the Holocaust, trauma theory is a valuable lens for studying YAL
texts and body issues. This lens allows us to (re)wound in order to bear witness. Elie Wiesel, a
survivor of Auschwitz, believes that testimony, bearing witness, is the rhetoric of our time (qtd.
in Vickroy,2002). By re-telling the story, painful and raw in re-opening of the initial wounding,
the survivor refuses to allow history to erase his/her voice. The listener in turn becomes a
witness, endlessly circulating the experience. Caruth (1995) defines trauma theory as a
disruption in traditional boundaries. The trauma’s “repeated possession” of the victim unsettles
the reader and forces us to think of what experience means (Caruth, 1995). Consequently,
readers and educators are encouraged to rethink “experience and communication in therapy in
the classroom and literature” (Toresmos, 2003, 335).
Since our study focuses on considering the body as a text, we are rethinking
communication. As Chaim Shatan and Kali Tal (1996) suggest there is no replacement for the
experience of trauma through language. In this presentation, we are looking at how young adults
position their own bodies as the text, as the mode of communication. Although some YAL
novels’ protagonists’ bodies are the site of the traumatizing event (e.g., Sarah Byrnes’ facial
scars are the result of her father’s abuse), in this study, we are examining characters who use
their body as a way to speak for them, to be their voice. Gunther Kress (2010) states that, among
other criteria, “what counts as a mode is a matter for a community and its social-representational
needs” (87). Herein lies a problem for both YAL protagonists and young adults, their mode of
expression is often misinterpreted or illegible to the community. Heightening, we believe, the
need for trauma theory analysis of these texts.
Additionally, we propose that the wound of trauma is never healed, but that the recirculating of the story is a goal in itself. Bearing witness is necessary so that a survivor’s story is
not lost within the larger framework of history. Thus, the individual’s story cannot be re-written
or erased from the larger narrative to fit political purposes because she has borne witness to her
truth (Caruth 1995).
As mentioned earlier, in order to understand how trauma and feminist theories can be
juxtaposed in an effort to understand how young adults position their bodies as text, it is
pertinent to understand major themes and history inherent in feminist theory.
Younger (2003) asserts that many young adult novels do not promote healthy views of
the female body. Young adult literature from the 1970s-1990s reflect how women began to
question society’s standards of beauty (Younger, 2003; Garcia, 2010; Stover & Zitlow, 2013).
The literature also questions body images and what they represent in the literature. Younger
(2003) assays how weight in many novels depict how the character is viewed. If a female
character is considered to be overweight, she was often portrayed as passive, depressed, and/or
promiscuous. The thinner female is seen as responsible and in control but only because she
mirrors society’s view of beauty. The female body is still described and viewed through the
“male gaze” which objectifies the adolescent female body (Younger, 2003; 2009; Garcia, 2010;
Grogon, 2008). Younger (2003; 2009) explains that female characters in multicultural literature
are increasingly being affected by the “ultra thin” model portrayed in the media and in literature.
The feminist perspective has explored how women have been positioned in society for
multiple years. This perspective will help inform as literature is reviewed, because it explains
how women are convinced that they should be sexually attractive to men (Burch, 1973; Grogon,
2008). Women’s sexuality is used to sell products. In addition, women characters are depicted as
having problems with their sexuality in literature due to the pressures that their culture places on
them and their sexuality (Burch, 1973; Wolf, 2009).
We will look at how the feminist
perspective defines women’s objectification and will also look at how a female adolescent who
has experienced objectification as she goes through puberty will experience depression and low
self-esteem. These symptoms will sometimes lead to eating disorders (Lindberg, Hyde, &
McKinley, 2006; Striegel- Moore & Kechler, 1999). Adolescents are bombarded with media
images that have unrealistic portrayals of the female body. The western image of the female
body in media and literature is used to position women in a powerless mode as they work to
reach a goal that it is very difficult to attain (Harrison & Cantor, 1997; Bessengoff, 2006). Thus,
in young adult novels, it is found that women are able to respond to trauma through starvation
and/or the cutting of the body.
Feminist theory analyzes how females react when they are dialogically constructed as objects
in literature. Many young adult novels portray anorexic girls as desiring extremely thin bodies
while they are being compared or contrasted with girls with fuller figures (Wolf, 2009; Restillo,
1988). The girls in the novel who have been found to have anorexia nervosa use food as a means
of control and power in an effort to obtain a smaller body (Wykes & Gunter, 2005; Restilo,
1988). The characters who are characterized as having anorexia nervosa express discomfort with
their bodies’ development during puberty (Wolf, 2009; Wykes & Gunter; Restilo, 1988). These
young characters face their own form of psychological trauma when trying to conform to
society’s definition of beauty.
We use feminist theory to give us insight into the protagonists’ uses of their bodies as sites of
protest and agency. Feminist activist Susan Brownmiller (1986) speaks of femininity’s
“tradition of imposed limitations” (cited in Bordo 2003). Historically, these “limitations” have
included job and civic opportunities as well as movement within the society. Today we often
consider these “limitations” most often involve restriction of beauty and focus on the slender
body (Bordo 2003). The use of the “body as an effective agent… is the very basis of human
subjectivity” (Merleau-Ponty 1962), and the protagonists, we contend, assert their subjectivity
through self-injurious acts. Either through “protesting like a girl” through such acts as being
force fed as a suffragette (Parkins 2000) or witnessing her trauma, using a feminist lens allows
readers to read this literature fully.
In addition to feminist views of the body’s agency and subjectivity, we also argue that the
body can be seen as a “mode” of communication. Gunther Kress (2010) states that, among other
criteria, “what counts as a mode is a matter for a community and its social-representational
needs” (87). Herein lies a problem for both YAL protagonists and young adults, their mode of
expression is often misinterpreted or illegible to the community. This heightens, we believe, the
need for exploration of young adult trauma literature using being theories.
Methodology
Drawing from our larger study, we focused on four YA novels: Laurie Halse Anderson’s The
Impossible Knife of Memory (2014) and Wintergirls (2009), Alice Hoffman’s Green Angel
(2010), and An Na’s The Fold (2008).
When selecting sources for our study, we chose books within the past decade that
featured protagonists who experienced traumatizing events. We were looking for a variety of
traumatizing events. For instance, the protagonist in The Fold, experiences trauma when trying to
make sense of how she could fit into society’s views of beauty. Also, Lia utilizes bodily utilation
and starvation, in Wintergirls, as a response to the trauma of losing her best friend, Cassie.
We used literary textual analysis to discover tropes and rhetorical strategies common to young
adult literature novels with protagonists who have undergone traumatic events. Textual analysis is a form
of methodology that permits researchers to analyze “across literary criticism, critical theory, and critical
discourse” (Bray & Evans, 2007). Conflating feminist and trauma theories with textual analysis allowed
us to not only analyze the books, but also cultural and social constructions.
In the 1980s and 1990s several adult novelists (e.g., Dorothy Allison, Edwidge Danticat, Jamaica
Kincaid, Alice Walker) brought this genre to the forefront. Their characters confront past traumatizing
events through varied narrative retellings. Often using testimonial-like structures to bear witness against
horrific abuse (Vickroy, 2002). YAL authors such as Richard Cormier (The Chocolate War, 1986), Chris
Crutcher (Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes, 1993), Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower,
1999) are among those who used this genre specifically for an adolescent audience.
The larger study analyzes YAL novels we coded for recurring themes that pertained to views of
the body and uses of the body to speak (i.e., writing upon and written upon). We utilized our research
questions to focus our data on defining major and minor themes, and grouped our data into categories.
Findings
1st Research Question Findings
What tropes, narrative structures/conventions are commonly found in YAL trauma novels?
A pervasive trope in the novels was the allusions to fairy tales. Given that some of the
issues involved cultural standards of beauty, this is not too surprising. Mirrors and their
punishing patriarchal commentary litter the books and protagonists attempt to deal with them
until the final pages, as with Lia desiring “a mirror that doesn’t matter” after “a lifetime of
staring into the mirrors” (Anderson 2009). Fairies in these novels do not bring enchantments, but
boobs, and the Big Bad Wolves can be boys or fathers or addictions. Girls “teeter totter on their
highest heels” (Anderson 2009) instead of the queen in Snow White “put[ting] on the red hot
iron shoes and danc[ing] in them until she dropped to the ground dead” (Grimm 1999), but the
idea is the same: feet encased in torturous slippers. Cassie’s, Lia’s anorexia-partner, dead body
is described as Sleeping Beauty, her acne and nose piercings hidden “under the foundation that
plastered her skin” (87).
Because of the magical realism, Green Angel has a overriding feel of the fairy tale.
Green’s ability to divine water and her hidden ivy-covered cottage in the forest evokes the motif
clearly. However, magical realism by definition must be grounded in realism as well, and
Green’s once utopian family life is smashed by their deaths in the city. All her survival methods
could be explained rationally, and the other elements as manifestations of her grief.
The use of the flashback and the discontinuity or fracturing of time are other tropes we
see arising in these novels. As Freud discussed in his early works on trauma, when the event
first occurs, it is not processed. It is only later, often after symptoms appear, that the trauma
event is worked through. Often this results in a lack of linear memories and in the memories
occurring in pieces or flashes (Crewell 2002, Caruth 1996). Most of the authors were true to this
pathology. Anderson’s The Impossible Knife of Memory particularly acknowledges this with the
father’s trauma. His PTSD stems from his service in Iraq, and Anderson uses separate chapters
written in his voice to relate those experiences. In the present, the father is unable to articulate
what happened over there. He is an alcoholic who is completely closed off to anyone but his
Army buddies.
This secrecy, the inability to tell one’s story, is something all the characters tell, except
perhaps Joyce from The Fold. Going inward, acting out the pain on their bodies is the common
factor of the protagonists. Readers are privy to the struggle only through the intimacy of the
written word. All the novels have a sense of “Come closer, lean in, because this is a story that
cannot be told at full volume, and is one I will not tell to just everyone.”
As is often the case in young adult literature, the endings of these novels do not end
conclusively. While they are hopeful, they are also ambiguous. In other words, realistic. Lia of
Wintergirls does not walk out of the eating disorder clinic at her goal weight with a healthy
attitude toward food and all her issues with her family solved, rather she is “thawing” (278). Nor
does Ash revert to the exact person she was before; she becomes a witness, telling the story
because “Every white page looked like a garden, in which anything might grow” (116). An Na
does not completely close the door on the possibility that Joyce will have eyelid surgery, but for
now, Joyce is happy with who she is. Today, she is strong enough to resist the pressure. In The
Impossible Knife of Memory, Hayley’s father asserts that another horrifying enactment of his
PTSD “is not merely improbably, you goof, that’s impossible” (391). It is Hayley, however,
who has survived this and born witness to it, who answers maturely, “You can’t say that” (391).
These endings respect the readers’ knowledge of “real” life without being overwhelmingly dark.
2nd Research Question Findings
How is the protagonist’s body used as a text in young adult literature?
Use of one’s body as a site of protest is not new, nor is it relegated only to the Other.
Those of us who came of age during the Vietnam War remember images of Buddhist monks selfimmolating in primarily to protest the policies of pro-Catholic president Ngo Dihn Diem. Less
publicized was the death of Norman Morrison, a Quaker, who set himself on fire outside the
Pentagon on 2 November 1965 to protest the US involvement in Southeast Asia (Time 1965).
Activist Kathy Change self-immolated to speak out against our country’s economic system in
1996. And more recently, in 2006 a Chicago war protestor also set his body aflame to speak in
the last language available to him of his distress and guilt over the war in the Middle East (Heher
2006).
While these acts were public, young people who are protesting society’s grip on
standards or who are acting through trauma seem to enact changes upon their bodies that are not
overtly recognizable as protest. Throughout the four novels we researched, the protagonists’
protests erupted in different ways, but one commonality was one site of protest was the body.
An Na’s The Fold main character endures, arguably, the least amount of personal trauma.
Joyce’s dilemma – to add another fold to her eyelids, giving her more Western-looking eyes -does, however, deals with a violence toward herself and to her ethnicity. The question she faces
goes further than changing hair color to changing a racial marker and thus as Susan Bordo
comments,“…[N]ormalization not only to ‘femininity,’ but to the Caucasian standards of beauty
that still dominate on television, in movies, in popular magazines” (255). In 2008, blepharolasty,
adding a double fold to the eyelid, was the most requested plastic surgery by Asian-Americans,
and ethnic plastic surgery is on the rise even in the current economically difficult times (Lee
2008). An important question arises: Is Joyce’s decision a protest against her current looks or
against her Korean identity? After all a part of Joyce’s family narrative if this story: Her
grandmother had married an American soldier whose family had reacted to her with the
comment, “How could he fall in love with some slanted-eyed gook?” (179). Joyce’s body
modification is fraught with implications. The reader is left to decide if Joyce eventually opts for
the surgery.
Meghan Trainor keeps singing that it is “All about that Bass” and while her mama tells
her “boys like little more booty to hold at night," many young women are still a chanting “Thin
is in.” And the media is backing and funding this movement. Additionally, refusing food has
been a political tool for women at least since the first wave of Feminism, and our history is laced
with images of protesting women being force fed through feeding tubes. Today Sharmila Chanu,
the Iron Lady of Manipur, has been striking for nearly fourteen years against a law that permits
troops to shoot suspected rebels. She has been on hunger strikes throughout, and only recently,
has an Indian judge ruled that her strikes are political speech. Thinness for women, eating and
not eating, has always been a cultural mixture of beauty and protest that creates deep, lasting
conflict within us.
Wintergirls (2009) by Laurie Halse Anderson is set in an eating disorder clinic. The
protagonist, Lia, loves her body, sees it as a canvas, quantifies it, the only weight that will “ever
be enough is 0. Zero pounds, zero life, double-zero, zero point. Zero in tennis is love” (220).
Lia is angry at her seeming loss of control over her body’s many changes. She writes her anger
upon it by starving it and cutting it. Sadly, no one knows how to read it, except other anorectics,
and they are in collusion with her.
The trauma in Hayley’s life, the protagonist in Anderson’s 2014 The Impossible Knife of
Memory, is both hers and her father’s. She strives to contain her grief around the loss of her
mother and to support her Iraqi-war veteran father as he copes, or more often explodes, from
PTSD. Hayley does this by building a wall between herself and the outside world. She claims
“electric blue” as her natural hair color and believes that the cheerleaders “cut themselves where
the scars don’t show” (20). Her look and ideology are distancing, even though “it was tempting
to let my guard down,” she cannot, because her dad needs her protection (360). Joyce wanted to
fit in, Hayley to stan apart so no one would get close enough to ask questions.
Green/Ash has no one to get close to; her family goes into the city one day and never
returns. In Alice Hoffman’s Green Angel, a work of magical realism, the main character moves
from a setting that is describe as Eden before the Fall to complete loss. Green transforms herself
into Ash and moves toward healing in a series of bodily markings.
After the death of her family in the city, Green is blind, but could see well enough to
“[take] the black ink and tattoo ravens and roses and bats that could fly through the dark. …I
could spy black ink, sorrows, loss, hearts breaking” (38). Green is searching to see, to find the
meaning behind the deaths. Remembering is like “pieces of glass…all of it painful as the
deepest wound” (50), she cannot even speak her own name.
Green finds alternatives to forgetting. Near the end she looks down at a half heart tattoo
she had drawn with a Diamond, a visitor to her cottage, to discover it had “turned green around
the edges. In the center it was red” (115). Her body was no longer a work of anger or protest
against the devastation of her family, but it was a site for possibility. Ash’s heart is opening
again. Her neighbor comments, “You made it happen. You are the ink. Write as you want.”
Scholarly Significance
The American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry reported in 2013 that selfinjury in teenagers seems to occurring more frequently. They list a multiplicity of methods and
reasons for self-injury, ranging from cutting, branding, and marking in order to “take risks,
rebel, reject their parents’ values” (AACAP, 2013).
Teachers can use the novels as whole class reads or suggest them to individual students,
based on perceived interest. The story lines are well written and hold readers’ interest. Further,
the novels have literary value.
As researchers our main intent was to find novels that young readers would find
compelling, but that would also challenge them to look deeper at the way people speak to them.
Perhaps the way they, themselves, are attempting to speak, to voice their pain, to bear witness to
their trauma. We believe these novels contribute to this field of study.
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