After a hiatus engendered by a certain lack of interest in blogging, I'm back. Yay? What brought me back? Well, I've jumped on the YA Lit vs WSJ bandwagon, of course!
In case you haven't followed the latest holler, WSJ has dissed teen lit as being too hideous to read ( http://on.wsj.com/iyb4Zn ). It's too dark. The topics are all violence, abuse, despair and rage. OMG!!! And the books validate these behaviors in teens!
I was a teenager once -- before teen lit was a genre. I read the "classics" referenced in the article -- The Outsiders ( a great story, but even then I thought those NAMES were ridiculous) and Go Ask Alice (drug abuse?!?! Cool!!). I also read the scintillating and banal, Mr. & Mrs. BoJo Jones (recommended by teachers the world over). A sorry piece of fiction, to be sure, but it made me think about what life would be like as a teen mother, and it reinforced my mother's Victorian stand on sexual relations before marriage. I read, and adored, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (mental illness! AWESOME!!). I read Elie Wiesel's, Night. It was a fave and full of real, actual terror and inhumanity. It was also pretty gruesome if not gory/explicit.
I was a Good Girl. What did I get from these books? Excitement. A view of other kinds of lives that I REALLY didn't want to live. Some knowledge about the world and that other people in other places lived other, often unpleasant, lives. Hmmm...
Since my teen years were at the very beginning of books specifically for teens, I was forced to read from the adult ouervre. What did I find? Some doozies, I assure you. I had a collection of vampire stories that included an excerpt from de Sade's Justine. Of course, I had no idea who the good Marquis was -- and the excerpt didn't include any "sex" (or, possibly, I didn't get it). I read the Bell Jar. Now that book is really uplifting. I wallowed in despair right along with Sylvia and loved every minute of it. I read bodice rippers -- which at the time were the equivalent of Zane books. Yummy! Had I found any books that were as explicit as some of the teen titles available today, I would have jumped on them with great cries of joy. More excitement! More despair! Plus the vicarious experiences of cutting, sex, abuse, gore... Just what teens want to read. I say more power to 'em!
No time in life (other than old age) is as lonely as the teen years. Teens are culturally fenced in. They are corralled by their parents' expectations; they fear that discussing issues with parents will be a indicator that bad behavior is going on or being considered. Their peers are braggers who boast of behaviors that they really don't act on, so talking about things with friends can get you labeled as someone who is not cool, hip, on top of things... Teachers operate in loco parentis, so they're out too.
Teens want to live vicariously through literature. Or they want their life experiences to be acknowledged -- by characters in books. Teen lit allows kids to explore without repercussion what's going on in the world. Books provide a forum of sorts where abused kids can find out they are not alone and where surly kids from well-adjusted families can find out that life's not so bad after all. Books offer a type of friendship and commonality that can fill the voids of a culturally constricted teen life in an ugly world of harsh realities.
Ms. Gurdon needs to get back in touch with her own teen years and remember how bleak it often seemed and how meaningful those teen titles were to her at that time. She needs to acknowledge that today's teen lives in a completely different world that the one of her experience. And if she's so disturbed by the content of teen lit, she should work to improve the conditions that many teens experience on a daily basis so that the "horror" that is current lit is no longer needed.
