Teenagers and Fairies?HUM 3285: Postmodern Adolescent Literature

Spring 2012Dr. Perdigao

March 2, 2012

Spirit Photography, Mumler

A Famous Mumlerism

Like at Disney. . . That ride.

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Postmodern Revisions• Revises Peter Pan, The Coming of the Fairies, uses the tradition, its language,

and reappropriates it

• “‘He is Peter Pan, you know, mother.’”

• “At first Mrs. Darling did not know, but after thinking back into her childhood she just remembered a Peter Pan who was said to live with the fairies. There were odd stories about him; as that when children died he went part of the way with them, so that they should not be frightened. She had believed in him at the time, but now that she was married and full of sense she quite doubted whether there was any such person” (Barrie 8).

• “‘You see, Wendy, when the first baby laughed for the first time, its laugh broke into a thousand pieces, and they all went skipping about, and that was the beginning of fairies’” (Barrie 32).

Postmodern Revisions• “‘And so. . . there ought to be a fairy for every boy and girl’” (32).

• “‘Ought to be? Isn’t there?’”

• “‘No. You see children know such a lot now, they soon don’t believe in fairies, and every time a child says, “I don’t believe in fairies,” there is a fairy somewhere that falls down dead’” (Barrie 32).

• “Tink was not all bad: or, rather, she was all bad just now, but, on the other hand, sometimes she was all good. Fairies have to be one thing or the other, because being so small they unfortunately have room for one feeling only at a time. They are, however, allowed to change, only it must be a complete change” (Barrie 55).

Psychoanalysis and Peter Pan• Language transformation, transformation of meaning

• Fairies dependent upon belief, Tinker Bell

• Need for fairies?

• Mab identified as revealed to those suffering from abuse; talking to Todd about abuse, Mab as “almost the same thing” (144)

• Barbie, Griffin, Damian (162), Hamilton Waverly (173), Mrs. Marks (182-3)

• Like Sis, Teeny loses her Mab (145)

• Pyschotherapy (Mab, red-haired therapist [182]) vs. belief, self-discovery?

• Contrast to father as psychiatrist (12)

Loss and Recovery• Griffin trying to define fairies, self-identifies, turning language: “‘I’m a fairy,

too! Hey, I’m a freaking fairy too’” (157).

• “Something is missing, but she already can’t quite remember what it is. What it is is a Mab” (146).

• “Maybe I’m growing up now. Maybe Mab was never real at all. Then she remembered a story she had read when she was little. Something about belief and a girl like Mab. A perfect girl with wings and a singing name. And how, without the belief of the children, the girl like Mab would die” (148).

• “There is a very famous story about a boy who knew someone a lot like Mab. But in that story, the boy saved her life by getting the children to believe in her. In this one, Griffin thought, the Mab taught the boy to believe in himself” (160).

• “‘It’s all about belief…’” (176-7): They, their power

The Sense of an Ending• Pain: hope?

• “The typical eighteenth-century novel of adolescence moves toward a fairly definitive happy ending in which the protagonist symbolically enters his or her anticipated adulthood. By the nineteenth century, more ambiguous conclusions abound: heroes and heroines still grow up, often, and marry, but as early as Austen the action preceding such denouements raises questions about the possible value and fulfillment of conventional maturity. The twentieth-century fiction of adolescence moves typically toward indeterminate conclusions” (Spacks 295).

• Melinda starts to speak: “‘Let me tell you about it’” (198).

• Stargirl leaves school, has lasting effect

• Barbie is transformed, comes of age? As writer/photographer, creator

• Superheroes, helping others (170)

Meta-ing• Thinking it’s a fake, as “true” story here (178)

• With belief in self, becomes Selena Moon, after refuting “them” (179)

• Barbie/Selena Moon as hybrid self, hybrid text here

• Redefined identity; Mab inside (180)

• Barbie/Selena Moon’s text, a metatext

• I Was a Teenage Fairy (181)

• Title of section, title of book within a book

• Ends with what Mab is, was, maybe…

Framing• From Spacks’ The Adolescent Idea:

• Exploration, Becoming, Growth, and Pain

• The Catcher in the Rye and others evoke “adolescents who oppose the existent social order, enjoy more vital passional involvements than their elders, face in their lives crucial and compelling decisions—the stuff of drama. The adolescent’s efforts alternately to resist the adult world and to find a place it in focus sharply on the intersection of the personal and the social often declared as the novel’s central concern” (Spacks 15).

• “The adolescent rejects boundaries, blithely crosses them, refusing to stay put, to remain a child, to accept subservience, to be predictable” (Spacks 289), refusal to be predictable

Framing• From Trites’ Disturbing the Universe:

• Trites’ study investigating the “fluid ways that the individual negotiates with her or his society, with the ways adolescents’ power is simultaneously acknowledged and denied, engaged and disengaged” (6).

• “Growth is possible in a postmodern world, especially if growth is defined as an increasing awareness of the institutions constructing the individual” (19).

• “The basic difference between a children’s and an adolescent novel lies not so much in how the protagonist grows—even though the gradations of growth do help us better understand the nature of the genre—but with the very determined way that YA novels tend to interrogate social constructions, foregrounding the relationship between the society and the individual rather than focusing on Self and self-discovery as children’s literature does” (20).