Popular Appeal: Books and Films in Contemporary Youth Culture [1 ed.] 9781443854313, 9781443852395

Citation preview

Popular Appeal

Popular Appeal: Books and Films in Contemporary Youth Culture

By

Sharyn Pearce, Vivienne Muller and Lesley Hawkes

Popular Appeal: Books and Films in Contemporary Youth Culture, By Sharyn Pearce, Vivienne Muller and Lesley Hawkes This book first published 2013 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2013 by Sharyn Pearce, Vivienne Muller and Lesley Hawkes All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-5239-2, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-5239-5

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ................................................................................... vii Chapter One ................................................................................................. 1 Introduction Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 13 Writing the Barbaric Recent Past: Holocaust Fiction for Young Adults Sharyn Pearce Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 43 The Work of Dystopia: Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games Trilogy Vivienne Muller Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 79 Staking and Restaking the Vampire: Generational Ownership of the Vampire Story Lesley Hawkes Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 111 Graphically Political: Exploring Social Issues in the Graphic Novel Vivienne Muller Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 143 The Popular Appeal of Environmental Epics: The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and Avatar Lesley Hawkes Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 175 Television, Entertainment and Education: Issues of Sexuality in Glee Sharyn Pearce Contributors ............................................................................................. 209 Index ........................................................................................................ 211

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Grateful thanks go principally to Tyler Bartlett and Liz Ellison, who proofread this manuscript and formatted it so thoroughly and efficiently. Thanks also go to Carol Koulikourdi at Cambridge Scholars Press for her encouragement, helpfulness and patience.

CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION

A cursory look at any best-seller list (the New York Times, for example, or the Australian), reveals that cultural texts aimed at young people between the ages of 12 and 18 years presently account for many of today’s top books in terms of critical and commercial recognition. This phenomenon has occurred principally over the past ten years and more, beginning with the success of the Harry Potter novels (the first was published in 1997, and the final three, at least, are clearly positioned for a youth market), together with Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy (1995–2000), and Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003). It continues today with the extraordinary international popularity of the Stephenie Meyer Twilight franchise (2005–2008); Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief (2003); John Green’s oeuvre including Looking for Alaska (2005), The Fault in Our Stars (2010); and, with David Levithan, Will Grayson, Will Grayson (2010); as well as Neil Gaiman’s novels and graphic novels (these include Coraline, (2002), and The Graveyard Book, (2008)) and more recently Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games trilogy (2008, 2009, 2010). Moreover, most of these texts have been made into very popular films, signposting the fact that Hollywood studios now cater primarily and very successfully to a youth audience. Scholars, authors and critics alike are agreed that Young Adult (YA) literature has become a global phenomenon, a fact accentuated by the fact that the New York Times was forced to inaugurate a children’s best-seller list, as distinct from the adult one, because the previous list was being increasingly dominated by Young Adult texts (Cart 2010, 96). This robust market has significant buying power (Cart 2010, 91), including not only those adults (including of course parents, teachers and school librarians) who have traditionally bought materials for the under-18s, but the young people themselves. Curiously, though, this easily identifiable publishing trend has not been translated into book-length studies examining this phenomenon. This collection of essays pointedly addresses a current void

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in the field. Most of the available material relating to youth studies is sociological in nature: for example, a number of studies examine the emergence of particular youth sub-cultures and youth styles of music or fashion (see Ross Haenfler’s Goths, Gamers, and Grrrls: Deviance and Youth Subcultures 2009)). Other texts look at specific instances of youth culture – for example Thomas Doherty’s Teenagers and Teen Pics: the Juvenilization of American Movies in the 1950s (1988), or Valerie Wee’s Teen Media: Hollywood and the Youth Market in the Digital Age (2010). To date the definitive text in the area of youth studies remains Kerry Mallan and Sharyn Pearce’s edited collection of essays, Youth Cultures: Texts, Images and Identities, which was published by Praeger in 2003. Youth Cultures has been highly influential in its interrogations of the spaces that youth occupy and are represented in texts produced for them, about them, and occasionally by them. Writers in this collection concentrated upon a diverse range of cultural landscapes which included not only popular literature and film, but computer games, pop music and videos, fashion, journalism and arts education policy. It is our aim in Popular Appeal to produce an update of some of the subject matter of Youth Cultures (this is especially pertinent as one of the three authors of this book was co-editor of the earlier text). This particular study focuses upon the specific areas of youth literature and film rather than the broader panoply of youth cultures. Since 2003 significant changes have occurred–such as the widespread popularity of graphic, vampire and more recently dystopian novels to cite just some obvious examplesíso a study devoted to these specific and burgeoning areas of literature and film is certainly timely. There is a strong and evident need for a follow-up book that applies a new lens to contemporary concerns. Moreover, at the present moment, texts which specialise in Young Adult literature are all too often either based in the classroom (for example Alsup 2010; Wolf et al. 2011) or are approached from a historical perspective and are geared to librarian studies (Cart 2010; Campbell 2010; Jones 1992; Aronson 2001). Books on specific genres such as fantasy, Holocaust and dystopian fiction (which have occupied a key market space since the impact of the September 11 attacks in New York, the increased threat of global warming, and the global financial crises), have also appeared in some numbers in recent years. A significant number of book-length critical engagements with dystopian writing for children and young adults have marked the academic field since that time. These include Carrie Hintz and Elaine Ostry’s Utopian and Dystopian Writing for Children and Young Adults (2003); Clare Bradford, Kerry Mallan, John Stephens and Robyn McCallum’s New World Orders in Contemporary Children’s Literature (2008) and

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more recently Carrie Hintz, Balakia Basu and Katherine Broad’s Contemporary Dystopian Fiction for Young Adults (2013) which specifically focuses on the darker themes of YA fiction, suggesting that writers and young readers are genuinely concerned about the future of their planet and ways to manage it for the greater good. Other critical texts engage with specific issues or authors. Some, like William Gray’s Death and Fantasy (2008) address a range of Young Adult fantasy texts, others such as the very recently published book by Alice Curry, entitled Environmental Crisis in YA Fiction (2013), deal with the pressing themes of ecological degradation and the relationship between young people and the environment as represented in a wide range of texts for young readers. There is a small pantheon of texts devoted to Harry Potter scholarship (see Nel, 2001; Hallett, 2005 as representative examples), and an even bigger and ballooning area dealing with Philip Pullman’s more controversial work (for example, Lenz 2005; Colbert 2006; Tucker, 2007; and Vere et al. 2008). Meanwhile, Rachel Falconer has written extensively about the so-called “cross-over phenomenon” (2009; 2010), while Chris Richards’ Forever Young (2008) is a loose collection of essays based on teaching Young Adult literature to Education students. The plethora of academic articles by established and emerging scholars in the field of YA fiction also attests to its legitimacy as a cultural site that provides important challenges to the ideologies and practices of many questionable hegemonic social and political structures. Our proposed critical study contributes to the burgeoning field of YA fiction studies by examining in chapter-by-chapter detail a select range of contemporary popular books and films targeting young audiences. We are defining the Young Adult audience in a broad, even porous, fashion here, as befits the fact that it is a term generally used in the industry (publishers, booksellers and school librarians) as a convenient, if often somewhat arbitrary way to classify texts. Once thought of as encompassing the ages of 12–18 (at a point when society formally relinquishes its duty of care), it is now mostly considered as also including those young people, eternal adolescents, “kiddults,” or “adultescents” forced by economic forces to remain in the parental fold and studying until the age of 30, whose coming-of-age has become distinctly more attenuated, as they delay commitments to professions and partners alike (Cart 2010, 119-121). While many of the texts analysed in this book are marketed for, and designed to attract, a young adult audience of somewhere between 12 and 18, it is obvious that they are equally attractive to an older cohort. What is emerging as perhaps more significant is that young adults are being addressed in recent YA texts in ways that increasingly call on them to

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respond seriously to many of the challenging issues of our times. In this focus there is an underpinning acknowledgment that “youth” are discerning consumers of media, actively engaged with the products of their culture. Now indeed is an opportune moment to consider the shifts in youth and popular culture that are signalled by the texts that are being read and viewed by young people in our target demographic. In a world seemingly compromised by climate change, political and religious upheavals and economic irresponsibility, we ask: What do young people like and why? We are deeply intrigued by the fact that at a time of fundamental social change, young people in all parts of the world are devouring fictional texts that focus on the edges of identity, the points of transition and rupture, and the assumption of new and hybrid identities. Accordingly, this book draws on a range of texts, using English, American, Australian and other international examples to address these issues, examining the ways in which key popular genres in the contemporary market for young people are being re-defined and re-positioned in the light of urgent questions about the environment, identity, one’s place in the world, and the fragile nature of the world itself. As Rachel Falconer has argued, “Young Adult fiction, having once been dismissed as an ephemeral and transient genre, has, by its very emphasis on transience, become a kind of cultural lightning rod, attracting to its conductive space questions and debates about what it means to be human in the twenty first century” (Falconer 2010, 88). The key questions we are asking are: x What are the shifts and changes in youth culture that are identified by the market and by what young people read and view? x How do these texts negotiate the addressing of significant questions relating to the world today (for example, concerns about the natural environment, the political issues related to the first world and the developing world, the role of religion in the affairs of the state, the ongoing tensions around gender/racial/ethnic inequalities?) x Why are these texts so popular with young people? x What are the most popular genres in contemporary best-sellers and films? x Do these texts have a global appeal, and if so, why?

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These are the over-arching themes and ideas throughout this study, presented as a collection of inter-related essays exploring a rich variety of forms and styles from graphic novels to urban realism, from fantasy to dystopian writing, from epic narratives to television musicals. In “Writing The Barbaric Recent Past: Holocaust Fiction for Young Adults,” Sharyn Pearce examines the current popularity of Young Adult Holocaust novels, in particular looking at Marcus Zusak’s The Book Thief (2005) and John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2006). While it was long thought by writers and scholars that the Holocaust was not an appropriate subject matter for young audiences, from The Diary of Anne Frank onwards it has in fact always been part of their reading matter. Never, however, has there been so much interest in the Holocaust, as the recent best-selling publications by Zusak and Boyne (both of which have been made into films) demonstrate. This chapter examines why this is the case, and explores the delicate and fraught politics of crafting stories for young people about the unspeakable events of history, including who (if anyone) has the right to “speak for” the victims, and whether some genres (for example, fairy stories, fabulism or magic realism) work best for a youthful audience, given the frequently horrific and graphic nature of the subject matter involved. Dystopian and utopian writing has always been a space in which our worst fears and best hopes are concentrated and sometimes realised. Dystopian YA texts in particular have been increasing in number and popularity in recent times, due in part to the lingering legacy of 9/11 and in large measure to the various political, economic and cultural global disturbances and disasters that mark our present time. This engagement with the dark side has clearly generated significant appeal to a youthful audience not only weaned on 3D versions of fictional apocalyptic events and violent catastrophes, but also living in a world in which the dystopian is a customary and visible accompaniment to the everyday business of life. In an article focusing on the current spate of young adult dystopian texts tellingly entitled “Apocalypse Now”, Karen Springen notes those narratives exploring “end-of the world scenarios are bigger than ever” amongst young adolescent/adult readers (Springen 2010, 21). She comments that young people especially express concern about their futures (including the effects of global warming, continuing wars and famines, terrorism, dwindling resources, the misuses of technology to name a few), seeing these as determined by an uncaring and often ruthless adult world. There is uncertainty about the future, and often dystopian narratives—as “scary” and unsettling as they are—give them some hope for a better

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world even if this is contained within the pages of a book. Often the hope resides in the main character as he or she is confronted by, and involved in, dire situations that have far-reaching and world-affecting influences. Educators have been quick to mine the YA dystopian text for its important themes about how we live now and might live in the future. Vivienne Muller’s chapter, “The Work of Dystopia: Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games Trilogy”, considers the ambitious, instructive and serious nature of YA dystopian fiction, in its engagement with issues that affect young and old alike, its challenges to hegemonic structures of power and domination, and the forms these assume. Of specific focus in the chapter is Suzanne Collins’s very successful “the Hunger Games” series which addresses these important issues in ways that have had wide appeal to young adult readers. Lesley Hawkes’s chapter “Staking and Restaking the Vampire: Generational Ownership of the Vampire Story” examines how the vampire is not only a contemporary cultural icon but also a site of contestation and struggle over cultural knowledge. Since Nina Auerbach’s 1995 Our Vampires, Ourselves, there has been much research on how each generation appears to have its own vampire, but this chapter examines how certain changes are more accepted than others. The vampire story becomes the space where young people can reveal their ownership over cultural knowledge and the rules that make up this knowledge. What emerges from this examination is the manner in which some shifts in the vampire genre are far more accepted and even celebrated than others. But it is in the discussion of what groups in society are allowed to cause and direct these shifts where new areas within vampire fiction are discussed. Why, for instance, is it accepted by readers that vampires can morph into day-walking sword-carrying martial arts specialists (as happens in Blade), yet when a vampire begins to dazzle in the sunlight there are outcries of disbelief? The struggle for certain changes in the genre is as much to do with who is allowed to have cultural knowledge and agency and who is not. The shifts that occurred in Twilight caused unease because many perceived that cultural knowledge was in the hands of young girls and women. Associated with this concern was the fear that the vampire story was blending with other not-so-suitable genres. The genre that is mostly discussed as bringing the vampire story down in cultural value is romance, and again, this may have its roots in gender issues. Hawkes gives detailed background information on the evolution of the vampire story beginning with John William Polidori’s 1819 The Vampyre and James Malcolm Rymer’s sprawling 1847 Varney the Vampire. She also examines Bram

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Stoker’s 1897 Dracula but her analysis concentrates on contemporary vampire texts: Blade, Blade 11, Blade Trinity, (1998–2004); Buffy (1996– 2003); Twilight (2005–2008); Peeps (2005); and True Blood (2008-). These texts represent a number of different engagements between the vampire tropes, readers, and fans, and the tensions that emerge between them. Who actually is “allowed” to own and change the vampire story and the popular cultural knowledge that surrounds it? In “Graphically Political: Exploring Social Issues in the Graphic Novel”, Vivienne Muller examines the capacity of the graphic narrative to deliver unpalatable truths about society and culture. The chapter argues that many graphic novels present themselves as very consciously directed interventions into traumatic times and/or social spaces in which issues of power, cultural differences and diversity are central drivers of the narrative and thematic action. Will Eisner’s highly regarded A Contract with God and Other Stories (1978) and Art Spiegelman’s popular Pulitzer prizewinning Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (1986) are iconic forerunners of the socio-political graphic novel, dealing as they do with social problems and dark truths in a compelling form. For an increasingly visually literate youth culture, graphic texts are a popular and appealing medium of thematic and aesthetic exchange. Drawing on the interplay of verbal and visual registers, graphic narratives encourage stories to be read in new ways, often generating new perspectives and modes of engagement from their readers. Their multi-literate nature is highly valued by educators wishing to engage their students in meaningful dialogue with serious social and political issues within the classroom. Through its analysis of a variety of graphic texts—Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese (2006), Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis 1 & 2 (2004), Shaun Tan’s The Arrival (2006) and the Stanford student collective project Shake Girl (2008)—the chapter explores Hillary Chute’s contention that the graphic novel can “perform the enabling political and aesthetic work of bearing witness powerfully because of its rich narrative texture; its flexible page architecture; its sometimes consonant, sometimes dissonant visual and verbal narrative; and its structural threading of absence and presence” (Chute 2008, 93-94). In the mainstream media, much is made about the lack of engagement between the youth of today with political issues. This, of course, is an exaggeration. However, one area where it is accepted that youth do have a major interest in and engagement with issues is the environment. Recently, there has been a growth in the number of publications that investigate the

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connection between the environment and young people. Alice Curry’s Environmental Crisis in Young Adult Fiction: A Poetics of Earth (2013) is an excellent example of one such work. Curry uses an Ecofeminist framework to explore young adult fiction and its potential for environmental engagement. In the chapter “The Popular Appeal of Environmental Epics: The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and Avatar”, Lesley Hawkes explores how these works of epic fantasy open spaces for the youth of today to activate and make meaning of the world they find themselves in and world they want to be in. The fantasy epic as a genre form appears to resonate with audiences and readers and this chapter examines why and how this occurs. Hawkes discovers that one of the reasons why fantasy allows dialogue on environmental issues to occur is because it is one of the few genres that does not demonise technology. We live in a technological world and to separate or negate technology is to also separate and negate its users. Epic fantasies have the potential to push through boundaries of separation and to give people a sense of agency and possibilities for the future. Finally, in “Television, Entertainment and Education: Issues of Sexuality in Glee,” Sharyn Pearce looks at Fox Television’s highly-rating U.S. television series, Glee, based on a fictional Glee club in a high school in Ohio. She argues that the program has been successful not only because of its fabulous musical numbers and engrossing teen romance plots, but also because it acts as a de facto source for sexual advice for young people, both straight and gay. Glee offers an up-to-the-minute analysis of present-day mores and in doing so it is uniquely positioned in mainstream television because of its part in providing lessons in sex and romance to young audiences who are actively seeking out information that is all too often unavailable in other educational spaces (such as the high school classroom, for example). The subjects and themes discussed in these chapters reveal the quite remarkable diversity of issues that arise in youth fiction and the variety of fictional forms in which they are explored. Once seen as not as important as adult fiction, this book clearly demonstrates that youth fiction and the popular appeal of this fiction is complex, durable and far-reaching in its scope.

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Works Cited Alsup, Janet, ed. 2010. Young Adult Literature and Adolescent Identity across Cultures and Classrooms: Contexts for the Literary Lives of Teens. London: Routledge. Aronson, Marc. 2001. Exploding the Myths: The Truth about Teenagers and Reading. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow. Auerbach, Nina. 1995. Our Vampires, Ourselves. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Blade, directed by Stephen Norrington (1998; Los Angeles, CA: New Line Cinema), DVD. Blade 11, directed by Guillermo del Toro (2002; Los Angeles, CA: New Line Cinema), DVD. Blade Trinity, directed by David. S Goyer (2004; Los Angeles, CA: New Line Cinema), DVD. Bradford, Clare, Kerry Mallan, John Stephens and Robyn McCallum. 2008. New World Orders in Contemporary Children’s Literature. Houndsmill: Palgrave. Buffy: The Vampire Slayer. Directed by Joss Whedon. (1996—2003; Los Angeles, CA: 20th Television, 2001), DVD. Boyne, John. 2006. The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. London: Random House. Cameron, James. Director. 2010. Avatar. Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, Australia. Campbell, Patty. 2010. Campbell’s Scoop: Reflections on Young Adult Literature. Lanham MD: Scarecrow. Cart, Michael. 2010. Young Adult Literature: From Romance to Realism. Chicago: American Library Association. Colbert, David. 2006. The Magical Worlds of Philip Pullman. San Francisco: Berkley Press. Collins, Suzanne. 2008. The Hunger Games. London: Scholastic. —. 2009. Catching Fire. London: Scholastic. —. 2010. Mockingjay. London: Scholastic.Colman, David. 2006. Chute, Hillary. 2008. “The Texture of Retracing in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 36.1/2: 92-110. Curry, Alice. 2013. Environmental Crisis in Young Adult Fiction: A Poetics of Earth. Houndsmill: Palgrave, Macmillan. Doherty, Thomas. 1988. Teenagers and Teen Pics: The Juvenilization of American Movies in the 1980s. Boston: Unwin Hyman. Eisner, Will. 1978. A contract with God and other tenement stories. New York: DC Comics.

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Falconer, Rachel. 2009. The Crossover Novel: Contemporary Children’s Fiction and Its Adult Readership. London: Routledge. —. 2010. “Young Adult Fiction and the Crossover Phenomenon.” In The Routledge Companion to Children’s Literature, edited by David Rudd, 87-99. London: Routledge. Forget the Film, Watch the Titles. 2009. “True Blood Title Sequence.” Accessed March 10th, 2013. http://www.watchthetitles.com/articles/00131-true_blood. Gaiman, Neil. 2002. Coraline. New York: Harper Collins. —. 2008. The Graveyard Book. London: Bloomsbury. Gray, William. 2008. Death and Fantasy: Essays on Philip Pullman, C.S. Lewis, George MacDonald and R.L. Stevenson. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Green, John. 2005. Looking for Alaska. New York: Dutton. —. 2010. The Fault in Our Stars. New York: Dutton. Green, John and David Levithan. 2010. Will Grayson, Will Grayson. New York: Dutton. Haddon, Mark. 2003. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. London: Jonathan Cape. Haenfler, Ross. 2009. Goths, Gamers and Grrls: Deviance and Youth Subcultures. New York: Oxford University Press. Hallett, Cynthia Whitney. 2005. Scholarly Studies in Harry Potter: Applying Academic Methods to a Popular Text. New York: Edwin Meller. Hintz, Carrie, Balakia Basu and Katherine Broad, eds. 2013. Contemporary Dystopian Fiction for Young Adults: Brave New Teenagers. New York and London: Routledge. Hintz, Carrie and Elaine Ostry. 2003. Utopian and Dystopian Writing for Children and Young Adults. New York: Routledge. Jones, Patrick. 1992. Young Adults and Libraries: A How-to-Do-It Manual. New York: Neal Schuman. Lenz, Millicent. 2005. His Dark Materials Illuminated: Critical Essays on Philip Pullman’s Trilogy. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Mallan, Kerry, and Sharyn Pearce, eds. 2003. Youth Cultures: Texts, Images and Identities. Greenwood, Conn.: Praeger. Meyer, Stephenie. 2005. Twilight. New York: Little, Brown. —. 2006. New Moon. New York: Little, Brown. —. 2007. Eclipse. New York: Little, Brown. —. 2008. Breaking Dawn. New York: Little, Brown. Nel, Philip. 2001. J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter Novels: A Reader’s Guide. New York: Continuum.

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Pullman, Philip. 2002. His Dark Materials Omnibus. London; Random House. Polidori, John William. 2009 (1819). The Vampyre: A Tale. Reprint, Auckland: The Floating Press. Rowling, J. K. 1997. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. London: Bloomsbury. —. 1998. Harry Potter and the Chamber of secrets. London: Bloomsbury. —. 1999. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. London: Bloomsbury. —. 2000. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. London: Bloomsbury. —. 2003. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. London: Bloomsbury. —. 2005. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. London: Bloomsbury. —. 2007. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. London: Bloomsbury. Richards, Chris. 2008. Forever Young; Essays on Young Adult Fictions. New York: Peter Lang. Rymer, James Malcolm. 2012 (1847). Varney the Vampire. Reprint, Auckland: The Floating Press. Satrapi, Marjane. 2003. Persepolis: the story of a childhood. New York: Pantheon Books. Spiegelman, Art. 1986. Maus: A Survivor’s Tale. New York: Pantheon. —. 2005. Persepolis 2: the story of a return. New York: Pantheon Books. Springen, Karen. 2010. “Apocalypse Now: Tales of Dystopia.” Publishers Weekly 257.7: 21-24. Tan, Shaun. 2006. The Arrival. South Melbourne: Lothian. The Stanford Graphic Novel Project. 2008. Shake Girl: A Graphic Novel. Accessed February 6, 2012. http://www.stanford.edu/group/cwstudents/shakegirl/. Tolkien, J. R. R.1999. (1954) The Fellowship of the Ring. London: HarperCollins. . 1954 The Two Towers. London: Allen & Unwin . 1955. The Return of the King. London: Allen & Unwin. —. 1995. The Hobbit: or there and back again. London: HarperCollins. Tucker, Nicholas. 2007. Darkness Visible; Inside the World of Harry Potter. London: Wizard. Vere, Peter, Sandra Miesel and Carl Olson. 2008. Pied Piper of Atheism: Philip Pullman and Children’s Fantasy. San Francisco: Ignatius Press. Wee, Valerie. 2010. Teen Media: Hollywood and the Youth Market in the Digital Age. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Westerfield, Scott. 2005 Peeps. Camberwell, Victoria: Penguin. Wolf, Shelby A., Karen Coats, Patricia Enciso and Christine Jenkins. 2011. Handbook of Research on Children’s and Young Adult Literature. New York, Routledge.

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Yang, Gene Luen. 2008. American Born Chinese. New York: Square Fish. Zusak, Markus. 2005. The Book Thief. Sydney: Picador.

CHAPTER TWO WRITING THE BARBARIC RECENT PAST: HOLOCAUST FICTION FOR YOUNG ADULTS SHARYN PEARCE

Speaking very generally, writing about the Holocaust has spawned a great deal of rigorous ethical debate, with much vehement positioning about the best way to approach this event. In the years immediately following World War Two and its horrific revelations of an overt attempt to completely annihilate a race of people, many scholars were convinced that there should be no literary representations of the Holocaust at all. A reverential moral silence was demanded by the intellectual gatekeepers of the day, who argued that the Holocaust simply defied artistic representation, a stance perhaps most famously exemplified by Theodore Adorno’s statement: “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” (quoted in Kokkola 2003, 18). In acknowledgment of the unspeakable inadequacy of language to describe, confront and contain the barbarity of the Holocaust, this position replicated the position of victims at a loss for words to explain their ordeals, that so-called “thwarting of language” (Gubar 2004, 450) which is so markedly evident in the oral histories of Holocaust survivors. These stories show a clear demarcation of the incongruities between the language employed by them to describe their unprecedented ordeal and the ordinary meanings of the same words, thereby demonstrating the linguistic alienation and stigmatised status of Jewish persons in Nazi Germany, of their inability to speak or write “in a tongue that has denied the writer a personhood” (Gubar 2004, 449). Moreover, in endorsing the notion that the Holocaust lay beyond the pale of artistic representation, scholars saw language as so abused by the Nazis for antiSemitic propaganda (as, for example, the relabelling to avoid using words like “murder” or “genocide,” instead using euphemisms like the “Final Solution,” “cleansing” and “removal”) that it had either lost its power to communicate effectively (Kokkola 2003, 17) or, alternatively, it was feared that the events could become normalised via everyday language

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(Kokkola 2003, 19). And so George Steiner could argue in Language and Silence that the Nazis used language so comprehensively that it was no longer a reliable, trustworthy tool for communication, and silence could be the only legitimate response: “How can a Jew speak of the Shoah in the language of his murderers? How can he speak of it in any other language? How can he speak of it at all?” (quoted in Baron 2001, 159. Steiner later recanted somewhat from this view, arguing instead that the Holocaust should be written about in German, for centuries the main language of anti-Semitism). According to Susan Gubar language itself had become an obscenity, “an instrument and casualty of the disaster” (Gubar 2004, 443), while Adorno (quoted in Kokkola 2003) identified the act of speaking as yet another form of abuse, because aesthetic appreciation of a text about such a horrific event could elicit voyeuristic pleasure which would add further to the victims’ suffering, an emotional reaction which Irving Howe referred to elsewhere as “voyeuristic sadomasochism” (Howe 1991, 429). In Lawrence Langer’s words, many felt speech to be impossible: “Language alone cannot give meaning to Auschwitz ... the depth and uncontained scope of Nazi ruthlessness poisoned both Jewish and Christian precedents and left millions of victims without potent metaphors to imagine, not to say justify, their fate” (Langer 1975, 27). From the midcentury onwards, then, language seemed utterly inadequate to the task of discussing the Holocaust: it was deemed “better to remain silent than to attempt to speak the unspeakable” (Kokkola 2003, 19). As Adrienne Kertzer argued “Auschwitz is what I cannot relate” (Kertzer 1999, 238). These views have, however, been revised as the Holocaust has become no longer a relatively recent memory, and the eyewitnesses, victims, perpetrators and bystanders have all but died out. Indeed, for the past twenty years or more, theorists have challenged these postwar responses and now the dominant view is that the dangers of misrepresenting the Holocaust are outweighed by those of failing to represent it at all, thereby risking a repetition of similar events (Lang 1999, Epstein 1988, Young 1988). This view became more pronounced following the foundation of the state of Israel but in particular after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, when writers renewed their fears that Jews were destined to be an embattled people always struggling to survive against an omnipresent anti-Semitism that could easily be ignited into another Holocaust by cultural, diplomatic, economic or political crises (Baron 2001, 166). James Young argued that “a society’s knowledge of the past is crucially informed by how that history was recorded” (Young 1998, 1), and moreover “as long as we name the events of this period, remember them, or figure them in any form, we also know them—however poorly, inappropriately, or dangerously” (Young

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1998, 98). More recently Kenneth Kidd reflected this changed perspective when he announced that Adorno’s declaration could and should be received more as a “call to narrative arms rather than a moratorium” (Kidd 2008, 162); for him Adorno was certainly not speaking literally, but using poetic licence, and what he was really saying was that poetry must be written after Auschwitz. This sea-change, beginning in the 1970s and generating massive momentum by the end of the century, meant that there was now a certain urgency about generating stories which would otherwise disappear when the remaining survivors were gone, and when the Holocaust could be forgotten or denied altogether (Baron 2001, 163). Indeed, the subsequent and burgeoning popularising of the Holocaust through products of popular culture such as Steven Spielberg’s commercial melodrama Schindler’s Ark even led to new accusations of an exploitative and mawkish “Holocaust Industry,” given that money and kudos came from portraying people who had died horribly in the Holocaust (Baron 2001, 125), while scholars like Norman Finkelstein (2000) went further in arguing that images of the Holocaust were manufactured to reap moral and economic benefits for members of the Jewish elite, particularly to heighten public sympathy for Israel and justify American interests there. Furthermore, Peter Novick suggested that in the United States it had become a sort of a “civic religion” for American Jews who had lost touch with their own ethnic and religious identity to experience the Holocaust vicariously, using it “explicitly for the purpose of self-congratulation” (Novick 1999, 13). Clearly Holocaust fiction has been and still remains a fraught and hotly contested space for debate. It follows then that as increasing numbers of writers and critics came to embrace the stance that speech should be privileged over silence, grappling with the most appropriate mode of representation has become especially significant (Kokkola 2003, 16), and literary artists have found themselves confronted with a “compounding complexity about their own medium” (Gubar 2004, 443). Many writers felt a moral obligation to approach the Holocaust as a sanctified piece of history; a solemn, even sacred event, with a seriousness admitting no response that might obscure its catastrophic enormity or dishonour its dead (Kokkola 2003, 10). Some felt that only those people who were directly affected had the right to respond (Kokkola 2004, 6), and that the genre of witnessing and being an insider to this nadir of evil was the most important element of Holocaust fiction, especially given the fact that “bearing witness” might act as therapy for those involved (Kokkola 2003, 85). For example, Claude Lanzmann declared that “a certain absolute degree of horror is intransmissible: to pretend it can be done is to make

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oneself guilty of the most serious sort of transgression” (quoted in Hansen 2000, 133); and in his documentary, Shoah, he limited himself to “talking heads” interviews, the only type of Holocaust reportage that he believed was not falsified at its moment of transmission. Moreover, according to Berel Lang, there should be no place for figurative or imaginative discourse: given the moral enormity of the subject matter, the Holocaust would be most ethically and appropriately addressed in non-fiction, as historical facts were the best way to convey the essence or “truth” of the events, and to fictionalise history was virtually blasphemous (Lang 2003, 81-144). Shoshana Felman agreed: “For the purpose of transmission of the Holocaust, literature and art do not suffice” (Felman 2002, 165). Still others argued otherwise, however; for instance some have claimed poetry to be the best genre for the Holocaust, because techniques such as “broken emissions, stuttering repetitions, eccentric personifications, untranslatable foreignisms, recycled quotations and inane rhythms” best reflect the Jewish experiences of the time (Gubar 2004, 457). And so, directly contradicting Adorno’s dictum, Edmund Jabes opted for a fractured kind of poetry: “after Auschwitz we must write poetry, but with wounded words” (quoted in Gubar 2004, 456), while Jerome Rothenberg asserted “after Auschwitz/ there is only poetry no hope/ no other language left to heal” (quoted in Gubar 2004, 461). Meanwhile Amir Eshel claimed that poetic literature had a transformative, liberatory effect, arguing that the “rhetoric of poetic presence” managed to release “the traumatic past from the bounds of historical reference and thus from the realm of the past” (Eshel 2000, 143). Yet other critics decided that realistic fiction was the best mode for conveying the death camps, with Aharon Appelfeld, for example, arguing for the importance of recreating the human figure lying behind the number of the dead, and insisting that the victims’ status and dignity could be returned via literary approaches which held the reader’s attention without titillating the audience (Kokkola 2003, 23). Meanwhile Lawrence Langer advocated a simple and understated narrative tone that did not detract from the historical material (Langer 1975, 83), and later argued that creative language was the best way to convey the atrocities of the past, declaring that while it is important to know the facts of the Holocaust in order to understand their causes and consequences, people’s inability to comprehend or indeed imagine the atrocities points to “the insufficiency of ‘mere’ historical narrative in Holocaust discourse” (Langer 2006, 131-132). Given the “semantic panic” (Gubar 2004, 445) inflicted by the Holocaust, many scholars felt that there was a valid argument for new forms of creative language, adopting Young’s statement that “to leave Auschwitz outside of metaphor would be to leave it outside

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of language altogether” (Young 1988, 91). Clearly the two main modes of Holocaust fiction which have emerged very strongly over the past twenty years or so are realistic historical fiction, which incorporates the events into the continuum of history and human experience, and, more recently still, versions of the “transhistoric” mode, “a mythical reality where madness reigns and all historical loci are relinquished“ (Hannah Yoaz, quoted in Howe 1991, 189). The field of imaginative or transhistorical Holocaust fiction in particular has flourished over the past decade, as scholars, writers and critics alike have come to see the validity and usefulness of creative Holocaust fiction. While representing the Holocaust remains and will most likely always be a fractious and disputed territory, this chapter later discusses two well-known and critically acclaimed texts for young people which use varying transhistoric genre approaches: Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief (2005) and John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2006). It examines reasons for their success (or otherwise) in conveying the horror of the barbaric recent past to a young audience.

Who has the right to speak? Given that the “speak or be silent” debate has for some time now been largely resolved in favour of speech, the question which arises next is that of ownership. While Jewish writers were the first to tackle the Holocaust, in recent years more and more non-Jews have also claimed a right to speak about it, thereby prompting discussion about the tricky and sensitive question of voice appropriation. For example, in an interview in the Guardian newspaper following the publication of his critically-panned Holocaust novel Beatrice and Virgil, Canadian author Yann Martel rejected outright the idea that the Holocaust is “indescribable, that it should be sacred,” and that most fictional treatments of the Holocaust are inevitably doomed. According to him, “It’s the specialism (sic) of the artist to go where other people don’t go... I don’t think the Holocaust gains by having artists staying on the edges. It’s always represented in the same way, in a non-fictional way, so the archetypal figures are people like Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel, or the historians. They’ve all done essential work, but I can’t think of any other historical event that is only represented by historians and survivors. Most other historical events will be taken on by artists.” After all, he argues, “It was the non-Jews who did it. It was an act of two groups, so it’s not just for Jews to be an expert on the Holocaust. In any case, we’re in dialogue with history, and you no more own an historical event than people own their language. The English don’t

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own the English language; the Jews don’t own the Holocaust; the French don’t own Verdun” (Moss 2010). While Martel’s words are scarcely diplomatically expressed, they nonetheless reflect very clearly recent developments in writing about the Holocaust. Writers who are non-Jewish, and even belong to another generation, are no longer seen to be automatically guilty of aesthetic or moral offences when they tackle this subject matter; Zusak and Boyne, for example, are differentiated from many Holocaust authors by virtue of their age and their nationality (Zusak is Australian, Boyne Irish) as well as their religion and race. Both, it is assumed, acquired their knowledge of the event almost entirely through reading, and neither had any direct association with it, although Zusak has acknowledged the role of his parents’ childhood stories of life in wartime Munich, particularly his mother’s memories of witnessing a forced march of Jewish prisoners to the nearby concentration camp in Dachau, which was later refigured into two key scenes in his novel (The Blurb n.d.). It is, however, notable that while non-Jews like Zusak and Boyle have taken to treating the Holocaust as an appropriate topic for their artistic endeavours, for the most part they do not attempt to speak “for” Jewish victims, preferring instead to use non-Jewish protagonists, with Jews as more marginal characters with whom their lives are entwined. This is certainly the case with the two novels examined later in this chapter.

Holocaust literature for young people Those ongoing debates about the best way to depict the Holocaust also pervade writing specifically geared for young people. Although there was a widespread “invisibility” of Jewish characters in mainstream Englishlanguage children’s literature prior to the Holocaust (Rahn 2003, 304), and most certainly a dearth of appealing or heroic ones, after the Holocaust came a distinct and permanent change in status. In keeping with the adult trends, children’s and young adult novels about the Holocaust have flourished particularly in recent years. While the reasons for this are naturally very similar, it should be noted that there is a significant difference between Holocaust works intended for an adult and a young adult/children’s audience. According to Adrienne Kertzer there is “a commonly recognised boundary between children’s and adult reading about the Holocaust, in that children’s books about the Holocaust seem to function primarily to explain what adult texts often claim is ultimately inexplicable” (Kertzer 1999, 2). Writing for young people has a history of didacticism, a prevailing notion that children can be moulded through literature to produce morally and socially acceptable behaviour: in essence

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this means that the explication of history was and is regularly used to build desirable models for present-day conduct. For example, Holocaust stories are often taught in classrooms in the United States, Canada, England and Australia, as a means of instruction and of enhancing historical understanding rather than encouraging close textual analysis. Such texts may all too often be earnest, well-meaning attempts at educating young people not to repeat past mistakes, and they may be in effect sermons demonstrating the devastating consequences of following Nazi ideals. Moreover, an upsurge of writing about the Holocaust for children and young people has been prompted by an increasingly acute scholarly and public awareness of young people’s hazy notions about it. For example, Elena Ivanova’s study of Ukrainian high school students’ understanding of the Holocaust revealed a knowledge that was superficial, murky, and harboured anti-Jewish stereotypes, with many students’ anti-Semitism either openly expressed or lightly camouflaged (Ivanova 2004). This seems especially alarming as the Ukraine was one of the territories where the Holocaust actually took place, so it is indisputably part of the fabric of recent history, and to see a potential resurgence of racial bigotry there was sobering for educators and authors alike. By the turn of the century, then, Young Adult literature, always ready to draw a moral from history’s mistakes and disasters in order to influence the moral good of the young, was ready to deal with the Holocaust in a very big way indeed. A text which would not reduce the Holocaust to trite or facile lessons, and which was able to render the horror without turning it into “pap for the masses” (Baron 2001, 170) would be especially welcome. Yet this upsurge in Young Adult Holocaust writing is further complicated by another factor specific to its designated audience. When considering texts for young people, one question always arises: namely, how much can children and young people take? There is a long tradition of protecting children and young people from the harsher aspects of reality, which is against socialising them into adulthood too early, and giving them adult pressures and cares at a vulnerable and impressionable age. Writers in this area are usually only too well-aware of the need to avoid traumatising children and adolescents with overly graphic depictions of violence or instilling in them a pervading sense of despair about human nature. Any literature about the Holocaust, however, is likely to break the otherwise strict taboo that children (especially young ones) are not to be frightened, presenting instead a world where parents are not in control, evil is omnipresent and survival usually depends more on luck than wits: a world, indeed, where adults killed children systematically, methodically, and highly effectively. Holocaust literature for young people might, in

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fact, be distinguished from the rest by its combustible combination of challenging subject matter, ethical responsibility, and its position outside the protective boundaries of much children’s literature, that authorial accountability traditionally owed to young readers. Lydia Kokkola, for example, actually insists that one of the distinctive features of Holocaust fiction for young people as it currently exists is its renegotiation of those certain well-established standards of acceptability, its tendency to break the usual rules and conventions (Kokkola 2003, 8), citing Berel Lang’s argument that it is “as if acceptance of traditional conventions would deny the unusual nature of the Holocaust as a literary subject,” and claiming that breaking taboos causes the reader to think again and more deeply (Kokkola 2003, 10). It is indisputable, too, that attitudes have changed greatly in recent years. Whereas in 1977 Eric Kimmel could ask somewhat rhetorically “Is mass murder a subject for a children’s novel?” (Kimmel 1977, 91), and answer firmly in the negative, more recently authors in the Young Adult field are increasingly averse to “whitewashing” historical events and treating them with extreme delicacy in order to protect the young. The Young Adult audience is now viewed by authors and critics alike as less vulnerable than in the past, as exposed to far more confronting situations in literature as well as in the media, where, for example, topics such as incest and paedophilia, previously held to be contentious, are now almost omnipresent. Moreover, judging by the extraordinary popularity of, for example, the Lemony Snicket books which gleefully feature serial slaughter, or Neil Gaiman’s Newbery Awardwinning The Graveyard Book, which begins with a triple homicide, violence is almost de rigeur, especially when the young reader knows fullwell right from the start that the empowered child protagonist will eventually triumph and all will end safely. As well as the routine treatment of violence, horror and trauma which occurs in fantasy novels and speculative fiction (and Harry Potter should of course be included here), subjects previously thought by many as too upsetting for children are now deemed by critics to be appropriate and even necessary in other genres such as realism. And so Karen Shawn can argue that Holocaust stories for children should present “the truth without unduly traumatising young readers” and “personalise the statistics, fostering empathy, compassion, involvement, and identification with victims and survivors” (Shawn 2009, 141), while Elizabeth R. Baer in “A New Algorithm of Evil: Children’s Literature in a Post-Holocaust World,” goes even further by emphasising the urgency of “a children’s literature of atrocity,” recommending confrontational texts in the classroom, and proposing criteria by which to measure the “usefulness and effectiveness of children’s texts in confronting

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the Holocaust sufficiently” (Baer 2000, 384). Finally, in a forceful article entitled “A is for Auschwitz,” Kenneth Kidd argues that a more direct confrontation with events such as the Holocaust is happening and should be happening: “we no longer have the luxury of denying the existence of or postponing the child’s confrontation with evil” (Kidd 2008, 120-121).

The Book Thief as a Holocaust novel Writers of historical fiction–that is, when the primary focus of the story is upon life in a different past, time or place-face difficulties that are not present in writing about the contemporary world. In many ways historical novels for young people disclose more about the present and the way the present conceptualises the past, than the past itself, because the reader is always predisposed to reflect on the present and history’s relationship to that present. Holocaust novels clearly reflect this contemporary focus and the urgent desire to ensure that the past never returns (albeit in different guises). Given that the events of the Holocaust are relatively well-known, the danger exists of overwriting the historical details and making the text a history lesson: consequently in the Young Adult market it is a “given” that precise chronological detail needs to be forfeited in favour of the recreation of a “sense” of the past, forged together with a concentrated focus on the central character’s identity development, in order to engage a contemporary reader who might otherwise be disinclined to take up a historical novel. Using key historical signifiers such as the Nazi bookburning, the Hitler Youth phenomenon and the German retreat from Stalingrad, in Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief, history is consequently presented not as a sterile collection of chronological events and facts, but as an integral part of the rich fabric of the life of his characters, convincing the reader of the authentic nature of the protagonist’s journey amid a judicious and light dusting of historical happenings. Interestingly, in some ways The Book Thief fits perfectly Adrienne Kertzer’s notions of what Holocaust literature should be/is usually like for young people. According to Kertzer, a representative Holocaust novel has a double narrative, is realistic, and yet is also ultimately hopeful, uplifting and life-affirming, illustrating the will to survive and the resiliency of the human spirit: “If we persist in thinking children need hope and happy endings...then the stories we give them about the Holocaust will be shaped by those expectations, and we will need to consider narrative strategies...that give readers a double narrative, one that simultaneously respects our need for hope and happy endings even as it teaches us a

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lesson about history” (Kertzer 2002, 74-5). Michael Martin also talks about the trend for a dialogic Holocaust novel that solves the dual purpose of the traditional need for “hope and happy endings” as well as the need for new lessons. Such a novel raises the disturbing notion of mass murder and genocide, traditionally avoided in Young Adult literature, but also emphasises life-affirming morality rather than just relating a meaningless disaster (Martin 2004, 315). Certainly this potentially difficult balancing act appears to be an over-riding concern for many authors, given that the usual plot lines in Holocaust novels have Jews as secondary characters, with their deaths occurring offstage, their fates thereby replicating the historical reality for most European Jews. The tension between this profoundly unsettling subtext and the primarily happy ending where the non-Jewish main character survives, and even grows as a person, allows for the disturbing realities of the horrific events without necessarily overwhelming or depressing the audience. As a consequence, then, much Holocaust literature tends to focus on good and helpful Gentiles choosing to protect powerless Jews by using secret hiding places, thus celebrating human solidarity and demonstrating the potential for human goodness in the most trying and catastrophic of times (and incidentally most surely representing the historical exception rather than the rule). For the most part Holocaust novels individualise, heroise, moralise, idealise and universalise, and in so doing retain the traditional Young Adult emphasis upon a young person’s resourcefulness and eventual triumph, despite the undeniable historical inaccuracies of this position. This standard format also uses the central character’s vicarious encounters with the Holocaust to enable the reader’s empathising with the victims. The developing relationship between non-Jews and Jews is therefore absolutely crucial to the plot, and is an important indicator of the novel’s moral and ethical concerns, seen through the growing understanding and self-awareness of the protagonist, which is facilitated by their direct experiences of witnessing Jewish suffering. Zusak’s novel is seen somewhat unusually through German eyes, although he declares that he is no apologist for them: “I’m not trying to get people to re-examine their views on Nazi Germany. All I’m trying to do, like every writer does, is to tell a story that hasn’t been told in this way before. It’s the hope to examine one small story in the big story we already know” (The Blurb n.d.). In his multilayered novel, a young German girl, Liesel Meminger, goes to live with foster parents, Hans and Rosa Hubermann of Himmel Street, in Molching, near Munich, after her own family unit is destroyed by the Nazis (her parents are both Communists, her father and younger brother dead, her mother vanished forever by the

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end of the first chapter). At first her new parents seem as unprepossessing as her new tough working-class surroundings, yet Liesel soon forms loving bonds with Hans and Rosa, as well as her best friend Rudy, and later Max, the young Jewish man hidden in the Hubermanns’ basement, who is cannily introduced a third of the way into the novel, following Liesel’s acclimatisation to the ways of Himmel Street and the beginning of her voyage of self-discovery. With the help of Hans and Max in particular, Liesel learns to read, firstly using a book she picked up at her young brother’s grave, and which is virtually the only connection she has to her lost family. She goes on to inspire those around her, in so doing writing her own novel which literally saves her life when, scribbling away in the basement, she survives the Allied bombing which obliterates Himmel Street and kills all its other residents while they are asleep. Liesel learns at first hand the transformative power of narrative, or, as Zusak puts it, “the power of words” (Zusak 2005, 159) to heal, transform and give life, and her personal empowerment is especially facilitated by the close relationship she forms with Max and her awareness of his daily struggles to survive. From the start, Zusak portrays Liesel and Max as soulmates: “They both arrived in a state of agitation on Himmel Street. They both nightmared” (Zusak 2005, 223). They are both riven with guilt about being the only members of their family to survive Nazi repression, and both their lives are dependent upon the generosity of the Hubermanns in taking them in: “In their separate rooms, they would dream their nightmares and wake up, one with a scream in drowning sheets, the other with a gasp for air next to a smoking fire” (Zusak 2005, 238). Hans comments shrewdly that Liesel and Max are alike because they are both scrappers: they both “like a good fist-fight” (Zusak 2005, 237), but most of all they are connected by their shared love of reading and books (they are, of course, both authors of a kind): “Max and Liesel were held together by the quiet gathering of words” (Zusak 2005, 268). Liesel’s intense empathy with Max culminates in her witnessing him take part in the forced marches of prisoners from the nearby concentration camp of Dachau, when: Never had movement been such a burden. Never had a heart been so definite and big in her adolescent chest. She stepped forward and said, very quietly. ‘He’s looking for me.’ Her voice trailed off and fell away, inside. She had to re-find it – reaching far down, to learn to speak again and call out his name. Max. ‘I’m here, Max!’ Louder. ‘Max, I’m here.’ He heard her. (Zusak 2005, 540-541)

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Magic Realism, Youth Writing and The Book Thief Yet, despite its obvious similarities to the conventional historical realist novel, The Book Thief is, indeed, rather more than that. It is, in fact, an interesting example of transhistoric fiction: that category which covers all forms of imaginative Holocaust fiction, in which the author’s creative expression and stylistic choices take precedence over historical fact (Yaoz quoted in Howe 1988, 189). Perhaps it is timely to suggest here that magic realism, seen most memorably in wartime fiction in Gunter Grass’s The Tin Drum, just may be the best and the most sympathetic mode of representing the Holocaust for young people, and magic realist elements may well be responsible for much of this novel’s extraordinary success. Magic realism is a highly contested and historicised term, with a plethora of definitions, but Bowers’ definition of “narrative fiction that includes magical happenings in a realist matter-of-fact narrative” (Bowers 2004, 2) perhaps best serves Zusak’s novel. By mixing magic with the everyday, magic realism subverts readers’ understanding of reality, causing them to question the accepted cultural and political structures of their society. Scarano argues that the genre achieves this in two ways: first, by narrating unreal events/behaviours in a realistic way so as to make them appear normal (for example, noting matter-of-factly that a lamp is talking), and second, by narrating real events or behaviours in an unrealistic manner (for example, using techniques of alienation or exaggeration), to transform reality into the realm of the awesome or strange (Scarano 1999, 15). Magic realism’s ability to interrogate fixed notions of reality provides another argument for why the genre might be suited to representing the Holocaust. According to Scarano, magic realism transcends fixed notions of reality by presenting a “dream-like reality so full of details that it turns into something more than reality itself” (Scarano 1999, 15). By combining the reality and the unreality, magic realism forces the reader to question both the text and reality itself: according to Wendy Faris it “searches for new presentations... in order to impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable” (Faris 1995, 185). Magic realism’s capacity to interrogate reality therefore provides a persuasive argument for the genre’s ability to capture the unreality and problematic “unpresentability” of the Holocaust. Given magic realism’s development as a response to social and political repression in Latin America and its means of empowering the stories of the dispossessed and disenfranchised (Faris 2004, 2), the “irreducible element” of the magic in the otherwise detailed realistic narrative challenges dominant Western paradigms, and allows magic to function within the texts as a means of social and political commentary

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(Faris 1995, 168). Magic realism’s postcolonial origins aptly synergise with the marginalisation of European Jews, and the mode’s subversive and ontological capabilities enable it to effectively convey the brutality of the Holocaust. It therefore seems an entirely appropriate vehicle for the presentation of the marginalised or “othered” perspectives of European Jewry in the Holocaust for a Young Adult readership. In addition, Young Adult literature has long had a tradition of ground-breaking, genrebending work, with authors like David Almond (Skellig) and Zusak himself in his earlier novel I am the Messenger defying genre classifications by mixing myth, fantasy, humour and realism, and in so doing generating both critical acclaim and commercial success (Smith 2007, 43). Magic realism is currently used in numerous novels for tweens and young adults, mirroring the way that the field of imaginative or transhistorical Holocaust fiction has also flourished over the past decade. Faris argues that magic realism is one of the most important trends in contemporary fiction, because the genre empowers submerged traditions that had otherwise existed on the periphery, while its transgressive quality enables the questioning of the values and assumptions of the dominant society it depicts. By creating a matter-of-fact world where the extraordinary exists side-by-side with the mundane realities of everyday life, magic realism transgresses boundaries; it concerns itself with “liminal territory... phenomenal and spiritual regions where transformation, metamorphosis, [and] dissolution are common” (Zamora and Faris 1995, 5-6). It is not surprising then, that Young Adult novels in particular increasingly employ magical realism to accomplish socialisation through subversion, and in so doing, help to integrate young readers into adult society. According to Don Latham, this liminal territory mirrors the “inbetweenness” of adolescence itself, a state which is no longer childhood but not yet adulthood. The fact that magic realism involves “the unsettling disruption of otherwise realistic narratives by magical events or beings; a merging of different realms; a depiction of identity (as well as space and time) as fluid rather than fixed; a preponderance of metamorphosis and a questioning of the social order” means that it offers a liberating potential to its readers (Latham 2007, 60). While magical realism is often the narrative mode of choice in works written from the perspective of the politically or culturally disempowered, and teenagers and young people are not normally viewed in this manner, yet it is nonetheless clear that they are developmentally and culturally sited on the periphery, having little real political or social power, and are in the very process of fashioning their identities. Latham argues that “given the way it accomplishes its cultural work, magic realism is a particularly appropriate narrative mode for

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depicting the complexity of contradictions and conflicts that characterise the young adult experience” (Latham 2007, 61), as it highlights the special ability of the adolescent protagonist to see the extraordinary amid the ordinary, and it implicitly offers an empowering message for adolescent readers, namely that they have the potential to transform not only themselves, but also the community in which they live. Modelling Liesel in The Book Thief, for example, the reader may vicariously make a personal journey to self-awareness. Via magic realism, then, teens may be provoked to think outside of themselves, to expand their historical horizons, to actively engage in the act of remembering the Holocaust, and to be forced into an active reading of the novel, constantly questioning the nature of the reality within the text and within reality itself. Via this genre these lessons for humanity may therefore remain meaningful and relevant today. According to Yann Martel (quoted in Robinson 2007), the bulk of Holocaust fiction so far replicates narratives of tyrannical Nazis and cowering Jews. Martel argues that these faded and familiar images of Nazis as dehumanised monsters, observed from afar rather than internally focalised, rarely engage readers effectively with these past horrors, or entice them to re-evaluate their significance for contemporary society. He also points to the need for transhistoric Holocaust narratives to reinterpret the atrocities so that they remain relevant by facilitating urgent moral and social responsibility, and forcing readers to re-encounter an otherwise distant historical event fast being relegated to the field of ancient history. Given so-called “Holocaust overload” or “compassion fatigue” (the not another book about the Holocaust factor: wherein people, and not just children, simply don’t want to face more dark, graphic and depressing stories about genocide and human suffering) magic realism offers an innovative way to tell a story and connect with this particular audience. When magical elements intrude into an otherwise realistic environment, the familiar narrative pattern is disrupted. According to Latham: “While the realism provides a credible context, the magic drives the plots and plays a major role in shaping the identities of the protagonists” (Latham 2007, 63). Magic realism challenges the realistic paradigms of Western narratives by allowing magic to function within the texts as key moments of social and political commentary, and in The Book Thief it is connected implicitly to the story of the Holocaust, and in showing Jewish Othered perspectives, specifically via Max himself. The Book Thief is a knowingly post-modern text, with its plethora of typographical symbols, cartoon illustrations and handwritten passages (almost all connected with Max).

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These metafictional techniques disrupt the “familiar” narrative presentation, helping to challenge how the reader perceives reality in the text, and forcing the reader to engage with the act of remembering history and the Holocaust. Zusak uses Max and his “magical” stories to interrogate reality for readers and question society’s “truths.” For example, his birthday gift to Liesel is his “Standover Man,” painted over Mein Kampf, almost obliterating the propaganda of that man’s life. “The Standover Man” is an allegory of Jewish life in Nazi Germany, using Max as EveryJew, and chronicles the friendship between the two orphaned outsiders, ending with: “It makes me understand that the best standover man I’ve ever known is not a man at all...” (Zusak 2005, 255). “The Word Shaker,” Max’s other gift to Liesel, is a fable describing their relationship built on words, as a tree that Hitler wants to cut down but is unable to destroy completely: The word shaker’s tree, in all its miles of height, slowly began to tip. It moaned as it was sucked to the ground. The world shook, and when everything finally settled, the tree was laid out amongst the rest of the forest. The word shaker and the young man climbed up to the horizontal trunk. They navigated its branches and began to walk. When they looked back, they noticed that the majority of onlookers had started to return, to their own places. In there. Out there. In the forest. But as they walked on, they stopped several times, to listen. They thought they could hear voices and words, behind them, in the word shaker’s tree. (Zusak 2005, 480)

Meanwhile Max’s fantasies of fighting Hitler also intrude seamlessly into the realistic narrative: Diagonally across, Adolf Hitler stood in the corner with his entourage. His legs poked out from a red and white robe with a black swastika burned into his back. His moustache was knitted to his face. Words were whispered to him from his trainer, Goebbels. He bounced, foot to foot, and he smiled. He smiled loudest when the ring announcer listed his many achievements, which were all vociferously applauded by the adoring crowd. ‘Undefeated!’ the ringmaster proclaimed. ‘Over many a Jew, and any other threat to the German ideal! Herr Fuhrer’, he concluded, ‘we salute you!’ The crowd mayhem. (Zusak 2005, 272)

Denied legitimate victory by Hitler’s powerful propaganda, Max feels “the fists of an entire nation. One by one they climbed into the ring and beat him down. They made him bleed. They let him suffer. Millions of them— until one last time, when he gathered himself to his feet” (Zusak

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2005, 275). As Max’s story unfolds, however, the next person to climb through the ropes is Liesel, bringing him the newspaper crossword which will occupy his day more profitably than in idle dreams/nightmares. Fragile, temporary order is maintained, as Liesel literally and metaphorically saves Max from madness and death. In other ways, magic realism functions to grab the reader’s attention and to almost replicate the horror of the times. Theorists have long considered the need for literature to mirror the grotesque elements of the Holocaust (Langer 1975, 15-17, Steiner 1967, 156-158). Applying the Bakhtinian concept of the grotesque to his ideas about Holocaust representation, Langer acknowledges the role of the “unimaginable” in creating effective Holocaust literature by evoking “a nightmare of fantasy that coexisted daily with the possible, the familiar, the real” (Langer 1975, 21). Basic tenets of humanity, like the belief in the triumph of good and reason, were obliterated by vast and efficient evil, creating a new ambiguous reality in which the “normal” and the monstrous must coexist (Langer 1975, 14). Magic realism’s use of the grotesque presents another argument for why the mode might effectively represent the Holocaust. According to Faris, magic realism employs Bahktinian notions of the carnivalesque, such as extravagant language, to highlight the “grotesqueness” of a textual reality that would combine “the world of ordinary people and that of witches” (Faris 1995, 172-183). For example, the squat, highly carnivalesque figure of Rosa, that poetess of cursing, adept in the art of “Saumensching” (Zusak 2005, 31), is a significant part of The Book Thief. Rosa “looked like a small wardrobe, with a coat thrown over it. There was a distinct waddle to her walk. Almost cute, if it hadn’t been for her face, which was like creased-up cardboard, and annoyed, as if she was merely tolerating all of it” (Zusak 2005, 28). In this new world where the normal and the monstrous coexist, grotesqueries are subverted to mirror the unreality of the Holocaust, and sometimes the monstrous is in fact the benign: SOME FACTS ABOUT ROSA HUBERMANN She was five foot one inch tall and wore her browny-grey strands of elastic hair in a bun. To supplement the Hubermann income, she did the washing and ironing for five of the wealthier households in Molching. Her cooking was atrocious. She possessed the unique ability to aggravate almost everyone she met.

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But she did love Liesel Meminger. Her way of showing it just happened to be strange. It involved bashing her with wooden spoon and words, at various intervals. (Zusak 2005, 35)

In this upended world Rosa, who proves to be “a good woman for a crisis” (Zusak 2005, 230), does not conform much at all to the saintly image of the good Gentile. In this particular instance the highlighting of magic realism’s grotesque elements helps to align the text with disturbed Holocaust realities, not only “the incongruity between the realistic and the magical that calls into question other aspects of the rational world and causes the protagonist to question the values and assumptions of the dominant society” (Latham 2007, 64), but also in creating even more awareness of the “unsettling permeability of supposedly fixed boundaries—between the dead and the living, the past and the present, and the marginalized and the empowered” (Latham 2007, 64). Magic realism is best exemplified in this text, however, by the audacious device of using Death as the narrator. This alone places the novel well outside the category of historical realist fiction, and answers Lawrence Langer’s pleas for the great and challenging narratives needed to convey the emotion and complexity of the events, for the need for new forms and metaphors to encompass the horror of the Holocaust, and the use of creative language as the only means to address the mind-numbing events which occurred (Langer 1975, 17). Langer argues that the scope of the atrocities means that purely historic Holocaust fictions allow less insight into the events than their imaginative counterparts while inventive language can act as a mediator between the unrelatable and the relatable: this replicates James Young’s stance that metaphors are readers’ only access to the facts of history (Young 1988, 91). Moreover, according to Jenni Adams, Holocaust literature for young people “negotiates the conflicting imperatives of protection from and exposure to trauma” (Adams 2010, 223), ensuring that the double narrative approach is always an essential feature of the genre. Adams goes further, however, by arguing that in Zusak’s novel the figure of Death also functions in this double way, by simultaneously confronting readers with a knowledge of the historical horror and protecting them from it, thereby offering on the one hand confrontation, and on the other, consolation. Death could be disturbing but actually serves to mediate the harsh realities of the subject matter, Adams concludes (Adams 2010, 223).

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Using Death as a narrator is a risky aesthetic gamble. It has been attempted before, most notably in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels, but in this instance Death is an appealing narrator because he is so different to the usual expectations: A Small Piece of Truth I do not carry a sickle or scythe. I only wear a hooded black robe when it’s cold. And I don’t have those skull-like facial features you seem to enjoy pinning on me from a distance. You want to know what I truly look like? I’ll help you out. Find yourself a mirror while I continue. (Zusak 2005, 329)

Zusak has spoken at some length about his difficulties in adequately and properly addressing narrative perspective in this novel. Apparently he tried a range of techniques, including omniscient narration, first, second, and third person narrators, as well as a pattern of shifting points of view, but nothing seemed to click; then he thought that as the story was set in wartime then Death would be the logical figure to relate the harrowing events. For the first few drafts he felt that Death was too sinister, enjoying his work too much: “For months I wrote in this way and I was falling short in some aspect I couldn’t understand. When I took a break from the book, I was sitting down on the back step and it hit me that Death should actually be afraid...of us. The irony of this was exciting, and it made perfect sense. Death is on hand to see the greatest crimes and miseries of human life, and I thought, what if he tells this story as a way of proving to himself that humans are actually worthwhile?” (The Blurb n.d.). Death comes across to the reader as an affable omniscient narrator, bored with the usual narrative conventions: “I could introduce myself properly, but it’s not really necessary. You will know me well enough and soon enough, depending on a diverse range of variables. It suffices to say that at some point in time, I will stand over you, as genially as possible. Your soul will be in my arms. A colour will be perched on my shoulder. I will carry you gently away” (Zusak 2005, 4). This supernatural narrator is keenly differentiated from the humans he is writing for, partly due to his all-knowing ability to dispense with literary conventions. He is careless to the point of indifference about plot sequencing, for example, and through the use of foreshadowing he gives away the plot, letting the reader know well in advance that Rudy dies in a bomb-blast: “I have given you two events in advance. I don’t have much interest in building mystery” (Zusak

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2005, 263). Death is easy to sympathise with as he is so profoundly affected by his own work: musing upon Rudy’s death, he comments “He does something to me, that boy. Every time...He steps on my heart. He makes me cry” (Zusak 2005, 565), echoing his earlier revelation about Rudy’s end, when he confesses “even Death has a heart” (Zusak 2005, 262). Physically and emotionally exhausted by man’s inhumanity towards man, he is “haunted by humans” (Zusak 2005, 584) and the terrible things that they do; he needs distraction and is intrigued by Liesel, following her closely to prove that people are worthwhile. The paradox is that he is humane and humans have lost their humanity: that he is utterly unable to know or comprehend “what humans are capable of” (Zusak 2005, 25). In his own way, also, Death is an utterly reliable narrator, quite convincing in his insouciant shuffling off of narrative necessities, and his desire to see some good in a blighted world. In my personal experience of teaching The Book Thief to a largely youthful audience, students will routinely say that the “magical” elements of magical realism, starting with Death’s first address to the reader, attract them to the text. From there they are led into the narrative and their questioning of that world, and the world about them, begins.

The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas Like The Book Thief, John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is not a realistic historical text, but neither does it adopt the earlier text’s magic realism, that often mesmerising weaving in and out of the ordinary and the extraordinary which is the hallmark of Zusak’s work. It is instead a fable, illustrating a clear moral lesson via the delivery of a “one-note” narrative which dishes up a dollop of harsh reality and a (literally) killer ending. In Boyne’s succinct tale the protagonist, Bruno, has moved from a comfortable home in Berlin to partake in what his father describes as “a great adventure” (Boyne 2006, 3), to a house in a desolate area, ‘the middle of nowhere,” “the loneliest place in the world” (Boyne 2006, 13), where “there was something about the house that made Bruno think that no one ever laughed there; that there was nothing to be happy about” (Boyne 2006, 13). His father has been asked by “the Fury” (Boyne 2006, 40) to go to “Out-With” (Boyne 2006, 24), to run essential operations of some sort for the Fatherland (it should be noted here that these rather coy euphemisms can become increasingly irritating as the novel progresses, particularly since the Fury/Fuhrer pun makes no sense, given that “Fury” is a completely different word in German). Bruno is bored and has no friends, but one day he makes the acquaintance of a boy called Shmuel

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who lives on the other side of the barbed wire fence surrounding his house (whose name, incidentally, he has no trouble in pronouncing). They form an unlikely friendship which leads to tragic consequences when Bruno joins Shmuel on the other side to help search for Shmuel’s father, who has disappeared. As a keen would-be explorer, he feels that it is his duty (and his calling) to help out. His innate decency therefore ensures his downfall. This story is devoid of the formulaic emphasis upon a child’s resourcefulness and ultimate heroic triumph in the face of persecution, offering instead a depressing and nihilistic point of view which is entirely at odds with the usual celebration of hope and heroism, and the spiritual victory over physical slaughter in the telling of Holocaust stories deemed tolerable for children and young adults. The extermination camps have rarely been dealt with as directly in Holocaust literature, although, for example, Margaret Wild’s picture book Let the Celebrations Begin! (illustrated by Julie Vivas) tackles the liberation of Belsen, albeit in a very sanitised way (Wild 1991). The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is perhaps best comparable with Roberto Innocenti’s Rose Blanche (1985), a pacifist book which also portrays history through German eyes, blending reality “with a fairy-tale” (O’Sullivan 2005, 154). Rose Blanche is a saintly German girl who witnesses a young boy trying unsuccessfully to escape from a truck. Following it, she discovers a concentration camp in the woods near her home and displays compassion by bringing food to the starving prisoners, thus leading to her death in crossfire. In this story of a “righteous gentile” and her martyrdom (Walter and March 1993, 47) the Jewish prisoners are not individualised like the good German, and the written text is devoid of historical explanation or opinion: “Rose sees what happens, but she doesn’t know or understand why; the emotional and cognitive perspectives of a child are kept throughout” (O’Sullivan 2005, 155), although the discerning reader can of course note the gap between her limited grasp of events and the details of the illustrations. Like The Book Thief also, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is seen from a child’s perspective. As in modern fables, like Antione de St. Exupery’s The Little Prince, the innocent point of view is used to reveal the flaws in the adult world. It differs from The Book Thief, however, in that it is devoid of opinion or historical explanations precisely because it is seen through the perspective of an uncomprehending child. The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is, in fact, almost a history-free zone, functioning more as an allegorical condemnation of cultural ignorance and political apathy, as well as advocating “assimilative empathy” rather than blind prejudice (Curry 2010, 71). This fable warns against fatal childish ignorance and

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generational amnesia, and points to the consequences not just for the victims but also for the persecutors. The events in The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas are seen entirely through Bruno’s innocent and often disarmingly egocentric eyes. When he first views the prison camp from his bedroom window, he asks his older sister Gretel “Who would build such a nasty-looking place?” (Boyne 2006, 32), “Who are all these people...And what are they all doing there?” (Boyne 2006, 35). Because these questions are never adequately addressed by anyone, he worries about all the people and their identical appearance: “And one final thought came into her brother’s head as he watched the hundreds of people in the distance going about their business, the fact that all of them,—the small boys, the big boys, the fathers, the grandfathers, the uncles, the people who lived on their own on everybody’s road but didn’t seem to have any relatives at all—were wearing the same clothes as each other: a pair of grey striped pyjamas with a grey striped hat on their heads. ‘How extraordinary’ he muttered, before turning away” (Boyne 2006, 38). This text is unusual in that it is not focalised by a victim of racial prejudice nor a traditionally sympathetic non-Othered person, like Liesel in The Book Thief, but it uses the perspective of a blinkered and unseeing aggressor’s child. In so doing it delivers up what Alice Curry refers to as a “blind space” lying behind the narrative frame, with Bruno constantly glancing at, avoiding, and consistently misunderstanding the Jews living alongside him, never able to recognise that they are, as Curry puts it, “stigmatised figures doomed to remain the object of another’s viewpoint rather than the subject of their own; they can move in and out of the frame, yet are incapable of remaining in full vision” (Curry 2010, 68). Indeed Bruno’s Jewish friend Shmuel is marginalised to such an extent that the book is nearly half-way through before he is introduced. Unlike Liesel’s growing awareness, this naive nine-year-old focaliser never understands Shmuel’s struggle to survive nor the racially-motivated persecution of those deemed Othered in his father’s world. Yet he is himself completely non-racist, and a conversation with Gretel about Jews (Boyne 2006, 182-3) points to the infantile ridiculousness of antiSemitism. When asked why he is not allowed to go and play with the children on the other side of the fence, Gretel replies that the children are Jewish, and: ‘They have to be kept together. They can’t mix with us.’ ‘Jews,’ said Bruno, testing the word out. He quite liked the way it sounded. ‘Jews,’ he repeated. ‘All the people over that side of the fence are Jews.’

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Chapter Two ‘Yes, that’s right,’ said Gretel. ‘Are we Jews?’ Gretel opened her mouth wide, as if she had been slapped in the face. ‘No, Bruno,’ she said. ‘No, we most certainly are not. And you shouldn’t even say something like that.’ ‘But why not? What are we then?’ ‘We’re...’ began Gretel, but then she had to stop and think about it. ‘We’re...’ she repeated, but she wasn’t quite sure what the answer to this question really was. ‘Well, we’re not Jews,’ she said finally. ‘I know we’re not,’ said Bruno in frustration. ‘I’m asking you, if we’re not Jews, what are we instead?’ ‘We’re the opposite,’ said Gretel, answering quickly and sounding a lot more satisfied with this answer. ‘Yes, that’s it. We’re the opposite.’ (Boyne 2006, 182-183)

In a text which points to the disastrous consequences for humans when countries align themselves along strict racial divides and devote themselves to pernicious ideologies, Boyne is at pains right from the start to point out the similarities between the two boys. His intentions are sometimes rather too obvious, as for example when he introduces the fact that they were both born on the same day, so “we’re like twins, said Bruno. “A little bit,” agreed Shmuel” (Boyne 2006, 110). Both Bruno and Shmuel live amid symbols which indicate their racial standing, though Shmuel’s is the Star of David, while Bruno’s is the swastika (Boyne 2006, 127), and neither boy understands the significance of these: indeed Bruno’s aesthetic preference is for the Jewish symbol. Once Bruno has had his head shaved due to lice, he looks identical to Shmuel, “only fatter” (Boyne 2006, 185): “If it wasn’t for the fact that Bruno was nowhere near as skinny as the boys on [Shmuel’s] side of the fence, and not quite so pale either, it would have been almost impossible to tell them apart. It was almost (Shmuel thought) as if they were all exactly the same really” (Boyne 2006, 204). As an emblematic figure of stunning national thoughtlessness, preferring to keep the Other at a distance, Bruno is well-meaning but limited, unable to see (or wanting to see) beyond his privileged life: for example, he brings bread and cheese to Shmuel, but eats some on the way when he is “a little peckish” (Boyne 2006, 138), and when bringing chocolate cake “Bruno got hungry on the way and found that one bite of the cake would lead to another, and that in turn led to another, and that in turn led to another, and by the time there was only one mouthful left he knew it would be wrong to give that to Shmuel because it would only tease his appetite and not satisfy it” (Boyne 2006, 161). In an even greater

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act of betrayal he denies that Shmuel is his friend and allows the sadistic Lieutenant Kotler to beat him for stealing food, an act that he had not committed. He is subsequently ashamed of this and wonders how “a boy who thought he was a good person could act in such a cowardly way towards a friend” (Boyne 2006, 174), though Shmuel doesn’t take offence: “I don’t feel anything any more” (Boyne 2006, 175), he says. As is familiar with books aimed at this youth audience, family is central to this novel. Bruno’s father says that “A home is where a family is” (Boyne 2006, 47), though his family, like Shmuel’s, is destined to be split up before the end of the novel due to his mother’s distaste for the “important work” his father is doing for the country (Boyne 2006, 48), and her reservations about bringing up her children in this environment. Bruno’s father is kind and helpful to others, including Maria, the maid, yet he abhors the people on the other side of the fence. According to him they are not people at all: “You have nothing whatever in common with them” (Boyne 2006, 53), he tells Bruno, advising him to keep away from them. Father is a “patriot” (Boyne 2006, 93) with a duty to his country, “correcting history” (Boyne 2006, 144), playing his part in the “national revival” (Boyne 2006, 146). Meanwhile good people like Maria and Bruno’s mother wait it out, obeying his father’s orders, following his lead, choosing to turn a blind eye to what is happening, never wishing to cause offence in any way. Bruno’s mother says “War is not a fit subject for conversation” (Boyne 2006, 69), but she needs more and more medicinal drinks to make her stay at Auschwitz bearable. And Maria says; “We must all just keep ourselves safe until this is all over... What more can we do than that after all? It’s not up to us to change things” (Boyne 2006, 65). And so the “good Germans” in this case do absolutely nothing, and this leads to disaster not only for the Jews, but their persecutors too. Finally, when Bruno joins Shmuel in the camp, he is at once confronted by reality. “In his imagination he had thought that all the huts were full of happy families, some of whom sat outside on rocking chairs in the evening and told stories about how things were so much better when they were children and they’d had respect for their elders, not like the children nowadays. He thought that all the boys and girls who lived here would be in different groups, playing tennis or football, skipping and drawing out squares for hopscotch on the ground” (Boyne 2006, 207). Instead of this he sees only “crowds of people sitting together in groups, staring at the ground, looking horribly sad;...they were all terribly skinny and their eyes were sunken and they all had shaved heads” (Boyne 2006, 207-8). But Bruno never makes that traumatic progression from innocence

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to fully understanding the horror of the world about him. Soon afterwards, he and Shmuel become part of the next group of people to be led into the gas chambers, never to return. When the door shut with a loud metallic clang, Bruno: raised an eyebrow, unable to understand the sense of all this, but he assumed that it had something to do with keeping the rain out and stopping people from catching colds. And then the room went very dark and somehow, despite the chaos that followed, Bruno found that he was still holding Shmuel’s hand in his own and nothing in the world would have persuaded him to let it go. (Boyne 2006, 213)

Bruno’s family, like Shmuel’s, is destroyed. Once his father finally realises what happened “he ended up sitting on the ground in almost exactly the same position as Bruno had every afternoon for a year, although he didn’t cross his legs beneath him” (Boyne 2006, 216). He is subsequently taken away by the soldiers, “and he went without complaint and he was happy to do so because he didn’t really mind what they did to him any more” (Boyne 2006, 216). Boyne’s allegorical format assumes that the reader is already familiar with the original story of the Holocaust, although the historical void means that it is possible that young readers might need adult mediation to explain Nazi ideology, for example. The story’s success, however, hinges totally on the reader’s belief that Bruno’s level of narrative is fictionally credible. As Boyne has himself noted, this is his biggest problem, and criticism for the book has centred on the necessity for the reader to suspend disbelief entirely in order to believe in the extreme credibility of the central character. Boyne admits: “People say, he’s verging on the stupid – how could he not know?,” yet he goes on to argue that given that Bruno represents a kind of symbolic “blindness,” this naivety is appropriate, and it is in fact based on real experiences of the time, when the camps existed but few people knew about them, or, more importantly, wanted to know, or chose to know (Carnevale n.d.). Boyne also makes some attempt to suggest that Bruno is rather young and immature for his age, stressing that as he is small and under-developed (Boyne 2006, 22), he is teased mercilessly by his sister’s friends in Berlin, as if his narcissistic tunnel vision could be explained by his stunted physical and by implication intellectual growth. The novel, of course, has the same internal inconsistencies as that earlier fable, Rose Blanche: neither protagonist, for instance, would realistically have been able to come close to the camp

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perimeter, let alone talk to the prisoners within. It is impossible to imagine that in The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, the fence would be unpatrolled by guards or dogs, and that it could be lifted up to allow a small boy through (the obvious question also remains: why wouldn’t someone try to get out this way?) In all likelihood, too, Bruno would have been indoctrinated with his father’s worldview from an early age, and as such utterly brainwashed and unquestioning about it. It is worth noting that both Bruno and Gretel—nine and twelve years old, respectively—seem much younger than that, even approaching kindergarten cluelessness at times. For example, it beggars belief that Bruno still thinks that the Fuhrer is the “Fury” and Auschwitz “OutWith,” despite being corrected several times: and a child growing up in a military household would never think that Heil Hitler simply meant “Hello.” Even Shmuel’s very presence is hard to believe: few children survived Auschwitz for long, unless they were destined for medical experiments, and the great majority was gassed upon arrival. While the moral of the fable means that obliviousness has fatal consequences, it is up to the reader to decide whether they allow themselves to be taken in by the narrator’s obtuse ignorance about the events occurring on the other side of the fence. If they do, they might well find the text a moving and poignant fable. Alternatively, they might find such unrealistic naivety to be emotionally manipulative and exploitative, and in effect a trivialising of the Holocaust, making it superficial, misleading, and even offensive in its maudlin chocolate-box sentimentality and its simplistic narrative. Although one reader might find The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas a lame and feeble allegory about the universality of ethnic hatred, others may read it as a powerful fable, and a touching story of friendship. It could perhaps be argued that the pre-pubescent child depicted in this novel occupies a liminal space where he is starting to develop his own moral landscape which is very different to the world about him, and that readers are encouraged to empathise with Bruno despite the inconsistencies in the plot. While this novel, unlike The Book Thief, does not highlight the “complexity and contradictions and conflicts that characterise the young adult experience” (Latham 2007, 61), it is nonetheless probable that some—perhaps many—young people will respond to this text and enjoy it because of its transhistorical nature: its marked “difference” to the usual Holocaust story. In fact I have been told anecdotally that it works well in a junior high school classroom precisely because of its unlikely narrative form. While speaking of literary representations of the Holocaust, Lawrence Langer has addressed the need to unlearn our literary assumptions, to “surrender...the comforting notion that suffering has meaning—that it

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strengthens, ennobles, or redeems the human soul” (quoted in Kertzer 1999, 6), and to reject the focus on the uplifting, heroic story, together with our need “for reassurance that mass murder had its redeeming features” (quoted in Kertzer 1999, 6). A fabular treatment, as in Boyne’s text, may well be an appropriate genre to convey systemic murder and the machinery of murder, possibly enabling readers to even enter the gas chamber without a shudder. Certainly it is the ending of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas which “in true fairytale style is grotesquely clever” (Wright 2006). As Boyne has commented, “it would be pointless... not to have that ending, giving real emotional punch,” and this provides readers with a sense of the enormity of what has largely been left unsaid, serving up a contemporary warning as well. The closure here is both structural and psychological, offering no aperture, only a brief didactic message about history not repeating itself: “And that’s the end of the story about Bruno and his family. Of course all this happened a long time ago and nothing like that could ever happen again. Not in this day and age” (Boyne 2006, 216). In The Book Thief the harshness of the ending is muffled somewhat as Liesel’s own death occurs much later after a full and happy life in a new country; although in wartime everyone bar herself and Max dies, the usual redemptive and uplifting narrative trajectory is seen to unfold later. In The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, however, the non-Jewish boy as well as the Jew dies, offering an unforgettable and emotionally devastating ending, a shocking and unexpected sting to the tale. In summary then, both Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief and John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas use transhistorical means to convey the barbarity of the Holocaust to an audience of young people. Morris Gleitzman, himself a writer about the Holocaust for young people, advocates focusing upon stories of love and friendship. He argues that this audience is much more open than adults, and is less inclined to fatigue. “But a story has to be a good story, it has to be about characters we care about grappling with things that are really important to those characters, and to us. We want to care about characters enough to see something of ourselves in them ...Young people do want stories about the tough aspects of life, and are capable of using them creatively—as long as those stories also confirm that our strengths are as powerful as our weaknesses” (Cunningham 2008). Both The Book Thief and The Boy with the Striped Pyjamas are attempts to recreate some of the darker moments in history in a way that has meaning for young readers. As Gleitzman again makes clear: “When I meet young characters in my imagination, sometimes I have to deal with the fact that their problems are not able to be solved, so the conventional happy ending is not possible...I look at history’s books

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and see that between 1.5 million and 2 million Jewish kids died in the Holocaust, and I haven’t done the sums but the ones that survived represent a tiny percentage. So if I’m going to write a story... I have to respect the historical probability” (Cunningham 2008). Both The Book Thief and The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas offer new ways at looking at the Holocaust. Given that Holocaust literature is now permissible for a variety of historical and ethical reasons, then it is likely that their chosen narrative modes may be best suited to this particular audience, its interest piqued by a fresh way of tackling a pretty familiar topic which might otherwise be uncomfortably close to a history lesson.

Works Cited Adams, Jenni. 2010. “’Into Eternity’s Certain Breadth’: Ambivalent Escapes in Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief.” Children’s Literature in Education 41.3: 222-233. Almond, David. 1998. Skellig. London: Hodder. The Blurb. n.d. “An Interview with Markus Zusak.” Accessed August 31, 2012. http://theblurb.com.au/Issue74/ZusakInterview.htm. Baer, Elizabeth R. 2000. “A New Algorithm of Evil: Children’s Literature in a Post-Holocaust World.” The Lion and the Unicorn 24.3: 378-401. Baron, Lawrence. 2001. “Experiencing, Explaining, and Exploiting the Holocaust.” Judaism 50.2: 158-175. —. 2003. “Not in Kansas Anymore: Holocaust Films for Children.” The Lion and the Unicorn 27.3: 394-409. Bosmajian, Hamida. 2002. Sparing the Child: Grief and the Unspeakable in Youth Literature about Nazism and the Holocaust. New York: Routledge. Bowers, Maggie Ann. 2004. Magic(al) Realism. New York, Routledge. Boyne, John. 2006. The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. London: Random House. Carnevale, Rob. n.d. “The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas- John Boyne Interview.” Accessed September 9, 2012. http://www.indielondon.co.uk/Books-Review/the-boy-in-the-stripedpyjamas-john-boyne-interview. Cunningham, Sophie. 2008. “The Darker Facts of Life: Interview with Sophie Cunningham.” Accessed December 12, 2012. http://meanjin.com.au/editions/volume-67-number-42008/article/interview-the-darker-facts-of-life/. Curry, Alice. 2010. “The ‘Blind Space’ that lies Beyond the Frame: Anne Provoost’s Falling (1997) and John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped

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Pyjamas (2006).” International Research in Children’s Literature 3.1: 61-74. Epstein, Leslie. 1988. “Writing about the Holocaust.” In Writing and the Holocaust, edited by Berel Lang, 261-286. New York, Holmes and Meier. Eshel, Amir. 2000. “Eternal Present: Poetic Configuration and Cultural Memory in the Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, Dan Phyro, and Tuvia Rubni.” Jewish Social Studies 7.1: 141-166. Faris, Wendy B. 1995. “Scheherazade’s Children: Magical Realism and Postmodern Fiction.” In Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, edited by Lois P. Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, 163-190. London: Duke University Press. —. 2004. Ordinary Enchantments: Magical Realism and the Remystification of Narrative. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. Felman, Shoshana. 2002. The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Traumas in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press. Finkelstein, Norman. 2000. The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering. London: Verso. Gonshak, Henry. 2009. “Beyond Maus: Other Holocaust Graphic Novels.” Shofar 28.1: 55-81. Gubar, Susan. 2004. “The Long and the Short of Holocaust Verse.” New Literary History 35.3: 443-68. Hansen. Miriam Bratu. 2000. “Schindler’s List is not Shoah: Second Commandment, Popular Modernism, and Public Memory.” In Visual Culture and the Holocaust, edited by Barbie Zelizer, 127-151. Piscataway, N.J: Rutgers University Press. Howe, Irving. 1991. “Writing and the Holocaust”. In Selected Writings 1950-1990, 424-445. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich. Ivanova, Elena. 2004. “Ukrainian High School Students’ Understanding of the Holocaust.” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 18.3: 402-20. Kertzer, Adrienne. 1999. “’Do You Know What ‘Auschwitz’ Means? Children’s Literature and the Holocaust.” The Lion and the Unicorn 23.2: 238-57. —. 2002. My Mother’s Voice. Petersborough, Ont.: Broadview. Kidd, Kenneth. 2008. “A is for Auschwitz: Psychoanalysis, Trauma Theory, and the ‘Children’s Literature of Atrocity’.” In Under Fire: Childhood in the Shadow of War, edited by Elizabeth Goodenough and Andrea Imme, 161- 184. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Kimmel, Eric. 1977. “Confronting the Ovens: The Holocaust and Juvenile Fiction. The Horn Book Magazine 53.1: 84-91.

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Kokkola, Lydia. 2003. Representing the Holocaust in Children’s Literature. New York: Routledge. Lang, Berel. 1999. The Future of the Holocaust: Between History and Memory. London: Cornell University Press. —. 2003. Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Langer, Lawrence. 1975. The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press. —. 1982. Versions of Survival: The Holocaust and the Human Spirit. Albany: State of New York Press. —. 2006. Using and Abusing the Holocaust. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Latham, Don. 2007. “The Cultural work of Magical Realism in Three Young Adult Novels.” Children’s Literature in Education 38.1: 59-70. Martin, Michael J. 2004. “Experience and Expectations: The dialogic Narrative of Adolescent Holocaust literature.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 29.4: 315-29. Moss, Stephen. 2010. “Yann Martel: ‘Jewish People Don’t Own the Holocaust.” The Guardian, June 22. Accessed August 11, 2012. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jun/22/yann-martel-life-of-piholocaust. Novick, Peter. 1999. The Holocaust in American Life. New York: Houghton Mifflin. O’Sullivan, Emer. 2005. “Rose Blanche, Rosa Weiss, Rosa Blanca: A Comparative View of a Controversial Picture Book.” The Lion and the Unicorn 29.2: 152-70. Rahn, Suzanne. 2003. “’Like a Star through Flying Snow: Jewish Characters, Visible and Invisible.” The Lion and the Unicorn 27.3: 303-23. Robinson, Tasha. 2007. “Interview: Yann Martel.” The Onion, November 6. Accessed August 21, 2012. http://www.avclub.com/articles/yann-martel,14166/. Scarrano, Tommaso. 1999. “Notes on Spanish-American magical Realism.” In Coterminous Worlds: Magical Realism and Contemporary PostColonial literature in English, edited by Elsa Linguanti, Francesco Maria Casotti and Carmen Concilio, 9-28. Amsterdam: Adolpi. Shawn, Karen. 2009. “Choosing Holocaust Literature for Early Adolescents.” In Teaching and Studying the Holocaust, edited by Samuel Totten and Stephen Feinberg, 139-155. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. Smith, Scot. 2007. “The Death of Genre: Why the Best YA Fiction Often Defies Classification.” ALAN Review 35.1: 43-51.

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Steiner, George. 1967. Language and Silence. London: Faber. —. 1988. “The Long Life of the Metaphor: An Approach to the Shoah.” In Writing and the Holocaust, edited by Berel Lang, 154-174. New York: Holmes and Meier. Walter, Virginia, and Susan March. 1993. “Juvenile Picture books about the Holocaust: Extending the Definitions of Children’s Literature.” Publishing Research Quarterly 9.3: 36-51. Wild, Margaret and Julie Vivas. 1991. Let the Celebrations Begin! Adelaide: Omnibus. Wright, Ed. 2006. “John Boyne’s Childhood fable Based on the Holocaust may Prompt Difficult Questions.” Age, January 3. Young, James. 1988. Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and Consequences of Interpretation. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Zamora, Lois P., and Wendy B. Faris. 1995. Magic Realism: Theory, History, Community. Durham: Duke University Press. Zusak, Markus. 2002. I am the Messenger. Sydney: Pan Macmillan. —. 2005. The Book Thief. Sydney: Picador.

CHAPTER THREE THE WORK OF DYSTOPIA: SUZANNE COLLINS’S THE HUNGER GAMES TRILOGY VIVIENNE MULLER 1

Dystopian fiction has long been popular with young adult readers in the Western world, but according to publishers and market analysts it is currently enjoying a heightened degree of attention from this readership (Miller 2010, 132). Of specific interest are those texts that construct “future-as-nightmare” scenarios (Springen 2010, 22). There is much speculation amongst publishers, writers and critics of YA fiction about the reasons for this trend, including the lingering legacy of 9/11 (Springen 2010; Bradford et al. 2008), but there is also agreement that young readers enjoy projecting themselves into a future space, especially one that resembles their own but takes elements of its already troublesome forms to stark extremes. In this narrative set-up, the reader is called on to identify with young protagonists as they struggle to work out not only how to survive but perhaps even contribute to transforming their world into a healthier, better place (Springen 2010; Reeve 2011; Bradford et al. 2008; Hintz and Ostry 2003; Hintz, Basu and Broad 2013). The relationship between events and crises in the “real world” and those of a futuristic dystopia is a core element of the instructional propensities of such fictions, despite the fantasy levels at which they operate. As Marianna Papastephanou argues: “In exaggerating the faults of the system, this kind of dystopia revitalizes the urge for change, the yearning for a better life” (2008, 95). Hintz and Ostry claim that utopian and dystopian literature can be a “powerful teaching tool” in many ways, particularly in inviting young Some sections of this chapter were originally published by the author as an article entitled “Virtually Real: Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games Trilogy”, in the journal, International Research in Children’s Literature 5.1: 51-63.

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readers to evaluate with a “critical eye” their own socio-political organisation, their understanding of self and others (2003, 7). At a more global level, the dystopian text “can lead young readers to see inequality in their own communities and countries, and even lead them into a finer understanding of how the industrialised world exploits developing nations” (Hintz and Ostry 2003, 8). While not always spelling out the way forward, or offering optimal happy endings of the sort that tend to characterise dystopian writing for children, YA dystopian fiction can nevertheless open up a space for a “transformative utopianism” (Bradford et al. 2008, 4). In Jack Zipes’s words, despite their seemingly negative nature, they paradoxically “form a great discourse about hope” (2003, xi). Thus the work of dystopia is considerable, demanding experiential, analytical and reflective engagement from young adult readers with hypothetical situations in an “imaginative environment that is affirming and supportive, but which also articulates dark truths” (Samball 2003, 173). In Contemporary Dystopian Fiction for young Adults, Hintz, Basu and Broad comment: “Whether they depict a post-apocalyptic struggle or a valiant attempt to retain individuality in a totalitarian world, YA dystopias are marked by their ambitious treatment of serious themes” (2013, 4). Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games trilogy comprising The Hunger Games (2008), Catching Fire (2009) and Mockingjay (2010) enters the YA arena of dystopian writing as a stand-out player with an enormous following and fan base. Considered more literary than the Twilight series and more thematically demanding than the Harry Potter books, it has spawned at least one facsimile (Lisa Haines’s Girl in the Arena), sold over 26 million copies and is rapidly generating a highly successful film franchise (the film of the first book grossed over $68.3 million on the opening day) (Simmons 2012, 22). Many educationists recognise the social usefulness of the Hunger Games texts in their articulation of issues that, while operating in a fictional future space, are very much a part of the here and now (Simmons 2012; Painter, 2012). Tom Henthrone has devoted an entire book to a literary and cultural analysis of the Hunger Games trilogy, pointing out it has “become part of the curriculum in the middle schools, high schools and colleges throughout the United States” (2012, 26). In an article on her use of the trilogy in the classroom, Amber Simmons stresses the important work it does in re-sensitising students to violence in order for them “to understand the reality of brutality and injustice” (2012, 23). The Hunger Games series has invited a variety of critical readings of its themes but there are a number of key aspects and strategies that affirm

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that it is first and foremost a critical dystopian text that, through its exploration of calamitous situations both past and present, compels young readers to consider the relevance of such circumstances to their own lives. Its strong but vulnerable female protagonist, Katniss Everdeen confirms that girls can do the heavy lifting when it comes to fighting for the downtrodden; its use of games/entertainment information technology culture as a major driver of action and theme emphasises the ambivalent and problematic role it plays in the lives of young people (Muller 2012); and its reference to disturbing political and cultural practices involving violence to children and other powerless groups in past and present societies captures the longevity of the dystopian proclivities in human behaviour and social formation. This chapter focuses on the ways in which dystopian and utopian tropes are deployed in the Hunger Games trilogy as social critiquing mechanisms raising important questions about how we live now with their implications for the future. In so doing the chapter briefly considers other YA dystopian texts that imaginatively explore similar themes.

Utopia and dystopia In New World Orders in Contemporary Children’s Literature, Bradford et al. note that since 1990, children’s and young adult literature has increasingly proffered “dystopian visions of dysfunctional, regressive and often violent communities” (2008, 107). They conjecture that this dystopian turn is based on the responses amongst writers to the many global geopolitical circumstances of war, racial conflict, terrorism, antirefugee sentiment and so forth. This engagement with the dark side has clearly generated significant appeal to a youthful audience not only weaned on 3D versions of fictional apocalyptic events and violent catastrophes, but also living in a world in which the dystopian is a customary and visible accompaniment to the everyday business of life. In an article focusing on the current spate of young adult dystopian texts tellingly entitled “Apocalypse Now”, Karen Springen notes that narratives exploring “end-of the world scenarios are bigger than ever amongst young adolescent/adult readers” (Springen 2010) and that editors and authors “credit lingering unease” from the World Trade Centre attacks of 9/11 as continuing to pique young readers’ interest in writings about the future. Springen claims that young people are especially interested in dystopian narratives that deal with the “what if” scenarios around global issues that presently mark and affect their world and are identified as potentially dire, something to be watched and carefully managed for the future. Such real

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world possibilities hailed by Springen and others include food and water shortage; climate change, global warming and the shifts in geospatial structures; organ transplants and cloning; terrorism; the ever-present threat of war and mass extinction, consumer technologies and the disturbing power of the internet. Dystopia, like utopia with which it is often antonymically paired, is a somewhat slippery and relative term. Hintz and Ostry refer to dystopias as “precise descriptions of societies, ones in which the ideals for improvement have gone tragically amok” (2003, 3). This definition clearly implies a symbiotic and complex relationship between the utopian and dystopian. Utopia is literally “no place”, so a utopian society is “a nonexistent society described in considerable detail and normally located in time and space” (Sargent 1994, 9). While Lyman Sargent explains that the positive form of utopia is “euotpia” and the negative is dystopia or “antiutopia”, it is now commonly accepted that the world utopia itself already carries positive connotations. It is customarily used to refer to a fantasised and futuristic society that is more “perfect” than the one that is recognised by the reader as his or her own (Suvin 1973; Levitas 1990; Sargeant 1994). Levitas defines utopia as “an expression of a desire for a better way of being” (1990, 8). The co-dependency of and tension between utopia as a “good” place and dystopia as a “bad” provides writers with ample scope for examining just what these concepts mean in specific situations, how they often overlap, and the ways in which they can be co-opted or massaged for sinister or moral purposes. The yearning for a better place comes from many sources, the shape of that better place spurred by ideologies that are politically and culturally specific and not always democratic and inclusive. Zipes comments that “the pursuit of perfection, the perfect place and society, can also lead to rigid if not totalitarian societies” (2003, xi) as adult dystopian texts Brave New World, NineteenEighty-Four and The Handmaid’s Tale compellingly insist. Someone’s utopia can easily be another’s dystopia, depending on who is running the show and how their rule affects others. In YA dystopian narratives, this conundrum is often a lynchpin on which the action and character development hinge. In Scott Westerfield’s Uglies series (2005-2006) young people transition from awkward adolescence into the utopian space of bodily perfection in young adulthood, courtesy of social and biological engineering mechanisms that are designed to make everybody happy, attractive and equal. However, this process is revealed through the narrative via young protagonists’ experiences to be confining and repressive to individual agency and development.

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While there is continuing debate about the meanings of dystopia and utopia there is also variance of opinion amongst critics about the nature of YA dystopian and utopian fiction. Many prefer the term “speculative” fiction to specifically denote the thematic interest in future social forms based on aspects of our present society which have the capacity for either good or evil or a challenging mix of both. For example, in their book Utopian and Dystopian Writing for Children and Young Adults Hintz and Ostry comment that a wide variety of writing could qualify as dystopian or utopian, including holocaust writing, but they choose to delimit the scope by considering “fantasy” texts that specifically “focus on the roots, abstract dreams and plans of utopia and dystopia” (2003, 5). There is also obvious overlap between dystopian/utopian texts and science fiction narratives dealing with an imagined future (Fitting 2010). The claim here has often been that science and technology taken to exaggerated extremes are essential features of the science fiction genre while they are not necessarily central to the thematic textures of dystopian/utopian fiction. In his article on Margaret Atwood’s “adult” dystopian novel, The Handmaid’s Tale (1986), Toby Widdicombe notes that there is only very rudimentary technology mentioned in the narrative, and that the dystopian society relies more on “extraordinarily old-fashioned” social control mechanisms (2006, 297). He also makes the point that Orwell’s 1948/1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four and Aldous Huxley’s 1932 novel Brave New World are dystopian texts both written well before Atwood’s text, but in their projections of the future elaborate in detail on the computer-based technologies that were just beginning to emerge at that time (Widdicombe 2006, 298). While the debates continue around what fits into the dystopian fiction category and why, and what exactly is the role of technology and science in both, it is perhaps worth noting that as technology develops and becomes more central to our lives, it is appearing with greater regularity in young adult fiction generally. This in itself is not surprising given the ways in which young people’s sense of self is also intimately connected with their use of and dependence on technological devices and internet communications. Much YA dystopian fiction, including the Hunger Games texts, affirms and explores this linkage (Muller 2012). Bradford et al. suggest that due to advances in technology, there is an increase in the number of young adult texts that deal with the relationship between embodied/lived reality and the virtual world. In their chapter on this nexus, they refer to such writing as “virtual reality narratives”. They assert that for some writers, the concept of a posthuman world “is to be embraced” while for others it evokes “scepticism and fear” even the spectre of becoming antihuman (2008, 155). YA fiction has more often than not

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engaged seriously with the dystopian aspects of this equation. According to Abbie Ventura, M. T. Anderson’s Feed (2002), Nancy Farmer’s The House of the Scorpion (2002) and Pete Hutman’s Rash (2006) present dystopian futures based on “a variety of technologies, including biowarfare, cloning, the introduction of computer software into the body and the use of surveillance systems and medications to regulate human emotion” (2011, 89). The outcomes of the tension between the regulatory technology-based systems of power and control and the individuals in these texts are not always optimistic ones. For other critics of utopian/dystopian fiction, patrolling genre boundaries is less urgent. Bradford et al., in New World Orders in Contemporary Children’s Literature (2008) find it more efficacious and inclusive to write about dystopian and utopian tropes in children’s and young adult literature as this approach provides purchase on important themes in a wide range of non-genre-specific texts. They argue that our human condition is propelled by both utopian and dystopian impulses. In children’s and young adult narratives they can function as motifs to “carry out important social, cultural and political work by challenging and reformulating ideas about power and identity, community, the body, spatio-temporal change, and ecology” (2008, 2). These are the issues that are central to the ways in which young people negotiate their identity and place within the social structure, and how that negotiation is curtailed or oxygenated by the sociocultural dynamics (2008, 19). Whatever the range of agreements or disagreements around nomenclature and classification, what emerges is that YA dystopian texts are popular with young and older readers alike because they converge on a number of recurrent themes that have general application for all humankind: “liberty and self-determination, environmental destruction and looming catastrophe, questions of identity and the increasingly fragile boundaries between technology and the self” (Hintz et al. 2013, 1). Clearly YA dystopian fiction is by no means a static category; it is frequently reprised as new ideas and new experiences arise, or as older ideas and situations are revisited in new forms. Ways of talking and writing about young adult dystopian, or utopian or speculative narratives have evolved alongside the fiction. However while cultural, ideological and literary theories and approaches such as post-colonialism, psychoanalysis, feminism and more recently eco-criticism, have been profitably harnessed, an abiding focus has been on the young reader and the ways in which the text invites him/her into its ambit. In this respect, many have differentiated between

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dystopian texts for children and those for young adults. Kay Samball notes that dystopian texts for young adults observe a careful balance between the darker prognostications and “admonitory impulse(s)” of adult dystopian texts which conclude in the “protagonist’s final defeat and failure” and the more romanticised, “happily ever after” outcomes of dystopian texts for children (2003, 165). The Hunger Games trilogy fits in various ways with the flexible descriptors of YA dystopian fiction that have been tendered. It is about a future dystopian world based on exaggerations and extensions of recognisable elements of our present one; it is run by a repressive, regressive and punitive regime; it centres on young people whose experiences of the world in which they live are shaped and re-shaped by its dystopian contours. Its young protagonist, sixteen year old Katniss Everdeen alongside others, provides a utopian counterweight to some of the more disturbing dystopian modalities that operate in her world; in particular, the deliberate starvation of parts of the population, and the brutal killing of children. It is this latter aspect that has so disturbed yet compelled readers and critics alike, as it is set up by the controlling powers as a form of entertaining video game which encourages young adults and children to see themselves as avatars/antihuman components operating in a virtual space. In stressing the capacity of computer technology to create the virtual world of the hunger games and in positioning her protagonist Katniss in a struggle with its powerful and confusing reach, the trilogy raises questions about the relationships between the “world of experience and the virtual world of information” (Bradford et al. 2008, 171). Collins makes it clear however that electronically generated virtual-type spaces with their inducement to suppress the real are simply modernised forms of technologies of control that many societies have been and are capable of exercising for sinister or useful purposes.

Dystopia now Most post-apocalyptic young adult novels presume the follies of adult agents in endangering and ultimately destroying the world as we know it, thus opening up the possibilities of a new world order that might not repeat the mistakes of the past or that promises to be more benign in its governance. In the Hunger Games texts, the post-apocalyptic social system is neither of these. Not unlike many of its contemporary companions, the post-apocalyptic new world order world depicted in the

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first book of the Hunger Games trilogy is either a utopia or dystopia depending on what position the individual occupies in the social structure and how they are affected by it. In general terms the society depicted resembles the kind of rigid totalitarian system Zipes identifies as typifying many fictional dystopian constructions, but it also bears markers of capitalist consumer society and its dystopian forms (2003, xi). Panem, the country in which the events of three novels take place “rose up out of the ashes of a place that was once called North America” (The Hunger Games 2008, 21). The current ruler of President Snow is said to have turned a once devastated country into a functioning and productive society, a utopia, bringing peace and prosperity to its citizens. This authorised version of the past has traction only as a virtual narrative; and it is revealed as a chimera as events unfold. The country of Panem is divided into twelve districts radiating from the Capitol (the richest) to the poorest (District 12), with each district providing its best services and products to the Capitol. As the narrative unfurls from the perspective and experiences of its young female protagonist, Katniss Everdeen from District 12, Snow’s account of the present as a better society than that of the past, belies the fact that the “utopian” is experienced only in the Capitol. Here the privileged populace are emotionally and physically sated by a limitless supply of food, entertainment, pleasure and leisure activities. The first book provides detailed descriptions of the people and activities in the Capitol, most of which signpost, in exaggerated form, material aspects of conspicuous consumption that characterise our present Western capitalist society: The cameras haven’t lied about its grandeur. If anything they have not quite captured the magnificence of the glistening buildings in a rainbow of hues that tower into the air, the shiny cars that roll down the wide paved streets, the oddly dressed people with their bizarre hair and painted faces who have never missed a meal. All the colours seem artificial, the pinks too deep, the greens too bright, the yellows painful to the eyes, like the flat round discs of hard candy we can never afford to buy in the tiny sweet shop in District 12. (The Hunger Games 2008, 72)

In this passage Katniss describes her first impressions of the Capitol highlighting its meretricious and superficial beauty in stark contrast to the drabness and squalour of the poorer Districts. Moreover her description discloses the homogenisation of identity and place under consumerism’s colonising pressures. The people in the Capitol are “artificial” and “flat”. The Capitol’s status as a pleasure dome utilising the latest technologies disguises a deeper reality—its consumer practices de-humanise and

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commodify the Capitol’s citizens as much as they do the poorer population on which they chiefly depend. The dystopian dimensions of Panem are augmented by an annual event called “the hunger games”, established as a reminder of the powers of the ruling elite and what can happen to the people should there be a rebellion. We find out that in fact such an insurrection took place in the past from District 13, as a result of which it was annihilated. Katniss learns, through the course of events, that the survivors of District 13 have formed an underground resistance group, recruiting many from the other Districts intent on overthrowing President Snow and his cronies and waging war on the Capitol. Until Katniss understands this and later joins the rebels (Mockingjay), her earlier encounters with the ruling elite are more solitary; a situation reinforced through the divisive nature of government and expressed in the punitive goals of the hunger games. The games are staged in a manufactured arena in the Capitol and promoted as entertainment for the citizens (The Hunger Games 2008, 80). They are brutal fights to the death involving young children and adolescents from all the Districts pitting their wits and skills for self-survival against each other. Twentyfour representatives (tributes), a boy and a girl from each District are selected by lottery each year and forced by the authorities to participate in a battle to the death until only one tribute is left. He/she is the winner of the game. With the exception of the wealthier Districts which produce Career tributes (tributes whose lives are dedicated to competing in the hunger games), the stakes are enviably high for the vast majority of the population who are kept in poverty and near starvation. The survivor wins a year’s supply of food, a decent house for his/her family and the perennial honour of being the winner of the games. There is however no guarantee of safety in being a winner as Katniss and others find out. The dystopian aspects of the social organisation of Panem are more extensively revealed in the story arc when Katniss voluntarily replaces her younger sister Prim in the annual reaping to participate as a tribute in the games. The death of her father in a tragic mining accident and her mother’s subsequent breakdown has left Katniss in the position of breadwinner and head of the household. Her life in her mining District 12 revolves largely around obtaining food for her family through hunting in the woods (a forbidden activity); trading with others in her District on the black market at the Hob and trying to survive, as are others, as best she can. Food is the major trading currency in a situation where it is scarce and strictly controlled by the government. When, as part of her preparation for the hunger games, she and her fellow tribute Peeta Mellark the baker’s

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son, are “fattened” up for the “slaughter”, Katniss is overwhelmed by the abundance and variety of food that can be called up by the press of a button: The top splits and from below rises a second tabletop that holds our lunch. Chicken and chunks of oranges in a creamy sauce laid on a bed of pearly white grain, tiny green peas and onions, rolls shaped like flowers, and for dessert, a pudding the colours of honey…..Days of hunting and gathering for this one meal and even then it would be a poor substitute for the Capitol version. (The Hunger Games 2008, 79)

White middle-class readers in modern capitalist societies would be familiar with the kind of the food that emerges from the table in Katniss’s description. Her comparison of it with the “poor substitute” she could contrive with her hunter-gatherer skills, works to re-position the reader to re-evaluate their relationship with the known, familiar and taken-for granted. YA dystopian fiction at its best unsettles readers, forcing them to confront their world and the safe places they occupy.

All the troubles of their world The “future as nightmare” scenarios have been identified by many commentators on the work of dystopian fiction as providing valuable cautionary commentary on problems that beset us on both a local and global scale and have important implications for our collective future. Because of young people’s regular access to multi-media particularly in Western culture, their exposure to all forms of entertainment and also to the challenging troubles of their world is unavoidable. YA dystopian fiction can therefore perform a mediating, interpretive and instructive role in this process. One of the ways writers effectively address their young readers is in exploring future calamitous events through their impact on the personal lives of the characters. Alice Curry contends that there are many YA texts that deal significantly with the effects of climate change and their deleterious impact on social and cultural structures and behaviours as a result of government inaction and irresponsibility. In dealing with what she calls “planetary transgressions”, such writing “forces the young readers into affirmation of or resistance towards current standpoints for ethical engagement with the earth” (2013, 23). In Susan Weyn’s Empty (2010), the earth runs out of oil, one of its most crucial commodities, global warming is widespread, and the young protagonists experience the cost of adult despoliation of earth’s resources on the acts and processes of their everyday lives. In Marcus Sedgwick’s Floodland

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(2000), the main protagonist Zoe is a refugee searching for her parents “in a world where rising sea levels have resulted in isolated pockets of dangerously overcrowded remaining land” (Kennon 2005, 41). Jo Treggiari’s Ashes, Ashes (2011) focuses on young people trying desperately to survive in a world devastated by plague and threatened by melting ice caps brought on by global warming. In Pablo Bacigalupi’s Ship Breaker (2011) the ice caps have also melted, causing sea levels to rise. The government is in chaos, there is massive economic breakdown, and the impoverished hero Nailer works as a ship breaker off the coast of New Orleans retrieving copper wires so that he and his family can get by in a society where resources are scarce and rival tribes compete for meagre gain. Through the localised contexts in which they are set, these dystopian fictions point to the large-scale global issues affecting the quality of life on earth as channelled through the experiences of young people. This last point however is not without its own troublesome politics. Most readers of young adult fiction are white and Western, living in a society that is already privileged, but within a world of vast inequalities. YA dystopian writer Philip Reeve makes the important assertion that young adult writers often relocate to “North America or Western Europe the sorts of poverty and oppression that are all too common elsewhere” (2011, 35). Rather than criticise this, Reeve chooses instead to argue that by making the woes of another society or social group that of the implied (Western) reader, “these stories make it easier for young readers to think about them, and to imagine what it might be like to live in a police state or a shanty town” (Reeve 2011, 35). The Hunger Games texts can of course be read in this metaphoric manner, in that they draw the reader into the impoverished/oppressed lives of familiar (Westernised) characters who can clearly stand in place of all disadvantaged groups everywhere; however the narratives are also highly metonymic in that they are critical of American (Westernised) consumer culture. Skinner and McCord note that in the Hunger Games trilogy, “Collins ties together the horrors of the past (death, destruction, oppressive government and poverty) with a portrait of an imaginary world with some similarity to our own culture or what we may become” (2012, 110). Like other dystopian writers, Collins weaves together the real and the posthuman modes to make connections between the present state of Western society and that of a future space less stretched over time and distance. The stark contrast between the inhabitants of the poorer Districts with their necessary black market economies and the luxurious “high-tech” excesses experienced by the Capitol’s populace underscores the global inequalities

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of our present times. Most critics and readers recognise these parallels. Even the name Panem closely resembles the word Pan-American, suggesting the global dominance of the United States of America with its economic, political and geographical colonisation of other countries (Henthorne 2012; Simmons 2012). Collins adds to the established body of literature that reveals the American Dream, particularly in its high consumer capitalist (Capitol-ist?) forms to be the possession of the privileged few at the expense of the suffering many. Moreover the intensification of consumerism within the Capitol is an opiate that effectively acts to “deny subjectivity and potential for resistance” (Ventura 2011, 94). Katniss asks and answers her own question: “What do they do all day these people in the Capitol, besides decorating their bodies and waiting around for a new shipment of tributes to roll in and die for their entertainment?” (2008, 80). Apart from characters such as Cinna, Katniss’s personal stylist who exhibits awareness of and later acts upon the system’s dystopian and damaging excesses, most citizens of the Capitol fail to see or are shielded from seeing “the destructive effects of capitalism’s ‘progress”’ (Ventura 2011, 94). Similar to Margaret Atwood’s dystopian world of Gilead in The Handmaid’s Tale, inequalities in the social system in the society of Panem are maintained not only through starvation tactics, but also through an effective regimen of fear and surveillance. April Spisak writes that dystopias are often characterised as societies that are “repressed, controlled and restricted with multiple social controls put in place via government, military or a powerful authority figure. Issues of surveillance and invasive technologies are often key” (2012, 55). Surveillance is of course a two-edged sword. It can be used for protective or repressive purposes (or both), but it is essentially a pervasive and often unquestioned element of life in the twenty-first century (Bradford et al. 2008, 20). In the Hunger Games narrative, we learn of the no-go zones that have been established in the various Districts to ensure that there is no leakage across the physical and social borders and therefore no opportunity for rebellion. These zones are constantly patrolled by external cameras and fly-overs and by the installation in every District of the ironically named Peacekeepers, many of whom are loyal lackeys of the Capitol. There is also the everpresent threat of technology used in both invasive and covert ways. Even the body is not exempt. Before the games begin, Katniss is injected with a “tracker” so that her whereabouts will always be traceable in the arena (The Hunger Games 2008, 174). Foucault suggests that external surveillance and self-surveillance are linked in systems of governance and control—the

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panopticon effect (1975, 1995). Collins’s narrative reveals that Panem citizens are prisoners of the internalisation of external scrutiny, a situation which not only binds them effectively to the source of their captivity, but also has the capacity to blind them to the plight of others. This is nowhere more ably demonstrated than in the hunger games themselves where the relationships between external optical surveillance and self-surveillance are core components, producing the required effect of compliance to authority. And where the threat of starvation, constant observation and the fear of annihilation are ever present, the killing, objectification and betrayal of others becomes a necessary evil.

Death as entertainment Death and violence in YA dystopian texts are no strangers to the genre. Hintz and Ostry note that they are often used in the fictional dystopian social order as part of a mechanism of control, a “punishment for dissidence and disobedience” (2003, 9). In Sonia Levitin’s The Cure (1999) the teenage Gemm faces the possibility of being put to death by the Elders of a dystopian group called the United Social Alliance because he experiences and expresses excess passion and emotions which are deemed disruptive to the smooth running of society (shades here of John the savage in Brave New World). The laws of the society in Lois Lowry’s Gathering Blue (2000) can ordain the deaths of those who are not considered useful and contributing members. The world of M.T. Anderson’s Feed (2002) is inhabited by people literally hard wired by biotechnology to be perpetual consumers to the extent that any autonomous subjectivity is effectively killed off. In the Hunger Games series, the violent deaths of young people as a governmental mechanism of reprisal and control motivate fear and self-preservation, leaving lasting physical and emotional scars on the population outside the Capitol. The dehumanising instruments of government are disturbingly evident in the hunger games but they are also revealed in accompanying cameos to the main story. Bonnie and Twill, two haunted and hunted escapees from District 8, tell Katniss of the horrifying reprisals of the government when the workers in their heavily industrialised and impoverished area rebelled against the conditions. The Avox, whose tongues are cut out as punishment for insurrection, are silent and horrifying reminders to Katniss of the constant threats to her own disembodiment and lack of agency. A former winner of the hunger games for his District, Finnick, reveals that he was “sold” by President Snow to the highest bidder as after his win he, and other victors of the games, became desirable and valuable commodities

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(Catching Fire 2009, 170). Finnick’s wife Annie, who witnessed the beheading of a male tribute, suffers psychologically from her encounter with violence. Haymitch Abernathy spends much of his post-games life as a belligerent and morose drunkard, trying to escape the brutal past. As strong and determined as she becomes to fight against the social order and those in power, Katniss herself suffers lasting emotional trauma as the final book of the trilogy clearly demonstrates. To compound the horror, the government of Panem has a long history of presenting the hunger games as a form of amusement for the masses (The Hunger Games 2008, 80). Collins has commented that one of the motivations for writing the Hunger Games trilogy occurred when she was channel switching between reality television shows where young people were competing for money and footage of the Iraq war in which people were fighting for their lives. ([Collins] Blasingame 2009, 726) This juxtaposition highlighted for her the parallels between the seductive power of reality television shows and the televising of wars with their leverage of the virtual over the real, their capacity to not only mute the impact of media representations of real experiences (particularly those of an adverse and horrifying nature), but to also be established as equivalent “entertainments”. In the entertainment space, there is the potential for desensitisation to the most brutal of actions and their consequences. In her comments on the violence in the Hunger Games texts, Margaret Skinner opines that she finds it “truly alarming not only how children seem insensitive to violence but how they and the media romanticize it” (Skinner and McCord 2012, 107). The eroticisation of violence and desensitisation of the self to the sufferings of others has been and continues to be an alarming aspect of all cultures, many of which have their own ways of expediting it for political and economic purposes. Child soldiers are recruited in many parts of the developing and underdeveloped world and inducted into and brutalised by violent acts of terror and horror. In her educational use of the Hunger Games trilogy in the classroom, Amber Simmons confides that by inviting her students to read Collins’s fictional tale of violence and brutality involving children alongside the true stories of child soldiers such as Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier (2007), she hopes to persuade them that “what we believe to be fiction is reality for some children” (2012, 29). However as the Hunger Games also reminds us, it is not only in the undeveloped countries that such things occur. In the developed world young people are trained as killing machines for the military industrial complex where violence is endorsed as a form of self-identification. The last book of the

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trilogy which features full scale war between the forces of the Capitol under President Snow and those of District 13 under President Coin underlines this point, receiving added emphasis with Gale’s decision to remain a soldier. Collins is not only concerned about the brutal acts human beings are capable of, but also how such acts can be de-fanged in “civilised” representational forms—a risk she of course runs in her own representation (see later section of this chapter on the politics of representation). Collins draws attention to events and stories, ancient and modern, involving death as a social means of control and punishment but disguised as entertainment. These include Roman gladiatorial games; the Greek myth of Theseus and the Minotaur; violent video/computer games, competitive “reality” television shows, and war itself in its “real” and mediatised forms. All share aspects of what Collins calls the “gladiatorial paradigm” which involves “(1) a ruthless government that (2) forces people to fight to the death and (3) uses these fights to the death as a form of popular entertainment”([Collins] Blasingame 2009, 726). These events also have the propensity to operate as simulacra in that in being turned into sites of spectacle they become unmoored from their referents and used by those in power for their own purposes (Baudrillard 1994). Like their ancient Roman counterparts, the hunger games are festive spectacles— public entertainments of officially condoned bloodletting and violence as confided in Katniss’s comment: “To make it humiliating as well as torturous, the Capitol requires us to treat the hunger games as a festivity, a sporting event pitting every district against the others” (The Hunger Games 2008, 22). Moreover, the arenas in which the games are held are recycled post the events as tourist attractions, thus enshrining their entertainment/representational value. As Katniss bitterly announces: “Go for a month, rewatch the Games, tour the catacombs, visit the sites where the death took place. You can even watch the re-enactments” (2008, 175). The so-named tributes, the participants in the hunger games, also recall another Roman practice of exacting payment (that is tributes) from the populace for the purposes of waging war. Reference too is made to the Roman system of rewards and entertainment that Juvenal was to call in Satire X “Panem et Circenses” (bread and circuses). In naming her futuristic dystopian world Panem, and in creating strong parallels between the Capitol’s privileged inhabitants and the upper echelons of ancient Rome, Collins critiques, as Juvenal did, the sinister practice of providing food and entertainment to the masses to ensure their compliance. In this connection, she indicates its social and political longevity.

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Collins also draws on the Greek myth of Theseus and the Minotaur as another example of the gladiator paradigm. The myth illustrates a ruthless ritual by which powerful rulers asserted their monopoly over the adult populace through control of the lives of their young people. While there are several versions of the story, in essence it refers to the “peacetime” punishment of Athens by Crete following the war between these two cities. As a reminder of who was in power, the rulers of Crete forced those of Athens to send ritual sacrifices, seven girls and seven boys every nine years into an intricate labyrinth where the monstrous Minotaur lived. Until the Minotaur was finally killed by Greek hero Theseus (with the help of Ariadne and her ball of string) volunteering as one of the young potential sacrifices, many helpless children died through this punitive political act. Collins commented that the “message” of the story was “we are going to do something far worse than kill you; we are going to kill your children” ([Collins] Ketteler 2010, 55). Katniss uses almost these exact words when she describes the scenario of the hunger games and its exploitation of children. She comments: “Whatever words they use, the real message is clear. “Look how we take your children and sacrifice them and there’s nothing you can do”’ (The Hunger Games 2008, 76). Collins plays with the myth in her narrative. Katniss is a re-configured Ariadne figure, whose wit and skills enable her to not only survive (unlike her mythical counterpart abandoned by Theseus on the island of Naxos) but to save others and to be an effective and resourceful opponent of the monstrous President Snow.

Let the games begin In our current times, violent video games, reality television shows, and media coverage of real wars serve much the same purpose as the Roman gladiatorial games or the myths and stories of violent and brutal acts. As Collins noted in her motivation for writing the trilogy, modern entertainments are, or can be, our modern bread and circuses in that they are potentially dangerous detractors from what might really matter in terms of humanity’s greater goals or the truths that their virtual mode so entertainingly conceals. In expediting this message, the trilogy charts the ways in which the powerful can transform the real into the space of the virtual for their own purposes in the process blunting the moral barometer of viewers and participants. The hunger games themselves encode the vexed relationships between the virtual and the real, with language and the theatrical playing a significant part in gilding the virtual to elide the real. Collins’s use of terms and actions that have familiar presence in the world

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of video games and media representations of war allows young readers to connect with this message. The arena is encased so that it resembles a television set. The nomenclature “players” connotes a level of representation, while the term “tributes”, usually linked with sacrifice, support and honour for self and country masks and objectifies what the participants in the hunger games really are—children and forced combatants in a dictator’s political strategy of control. The supervisors of the hunger games are called “Gamemakers” responsible for designing and controlling the killing fields and managing the flow of the game so that the tributes encounter each other. The topography of the arena, the flora and fauna and the weather are artificially manipulated while dangerous and deadly obstacles—fireballs, minefields, forcefields, and genetically manipulated tracker jacker wasps with potent hallucinatory venom—are deliberately put in the way of the participants to direct the action. The Career tributes from Districts 1 and 2, who, like some of the top order Roman gladiators, train all their lives to participate in the games, are posited as the ones to kill. If the players do not die by each other’s hands which is the desired goal, the Gamekeepers can arrange to have them killed anytime “just to remind the players they can” (The Hunger Games 2008, 214). In participating in the seventy-fourth hunger games, Katniss is reminded of the performative nature of the event by the omnipresence of the cameras when she remarks: “I’m probably on screen right now” (The Hunger Games 2008, 180). Moreover the simulated mode, as her comments imply, encourages the tributes to function as avatars; they are “players” and representatives of District 2, or 3 or 12 rather than subjects with real names, histories, sentient bodies and agency. At the end of one day’s carnage Katniss comments: “Eleven dead in all. Thirteen left to play” (The Hunger Games 2008, 185). Her first “kill” is another player simply known as the boy from District 1 whose real name is not known to her. When Katniss secures a new cluster of arrows from the dead body of Glimmer for whose death she is responsible, she remarks that “the weapons give me an entirely new perspective on the Games…If Cato broke through the trees right now, I wouldn’t flee, I’d shoot. I find I am actually anticipating the moment with pleasure” (The Hunger Games 2008, 239). These comments are suggestive of her induction into experiencing life and death as a game of survival, of kill or be killed, operating in virtual space and time. They posit and mandate the cognitive and corporeal body as an objectified, and, according to Curry, “animalised” site (2013). It is evident that the lives of the citizens of Panem are intimately tied to the hunger games; it is their central point of reference, and its virtual,

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mediatised modality is firmly sustained in the popular imaginary. Katniss for example clearly remembers many past games, recalling those that were not successful or popular with the viewers. She comments that “one year they provided only horrible spiked maces” and on another occasion they were set in a “landscape of nothing but boulders and sand and scruffy bushes where many contestants were bitten by venomous snakes or went insane from thirst” (The Hunger Games 2008, 47). This dispassionate reference to the hunger games reads more like an allusion to a failed, poor quality television drama rather than what they really are—a slaughter in which young people competitively kill each other for the amusement of the populace and reinforcement of the positions of the powerful ruling elite.

Virtually real Baudrillard suggests that the constant transformations from the real to the virtual as occurs in our modern age, confounds the distinction between them so it “becomes impossible (for one) to locate” oneself in time and space, to work out if one is outside or inside the simulacrum (1994, 29). In the hunger games of the first book, the viewing audience are invited to actively participate in the drama of the games, effectively moving them into a virtual space in which they no longer are able to maintain a sense of the real. They are urged to become sponsors, providing food or weaponry to help their favourite tribute win. In this they are recruited as associate directors of the simulation, players of and in the game, contributing to its theatricality and its sub-plots. For those in the Capitol this is a particularly potent invitation as it calls on an exercise of power and control reassuring them of their higher social status and reinforcing the objectification of self and others in the social field. In reality what they are doing is aiding and abetting murder and violence. Katniss herself is aware of the game-playing mode which pressures her into the same dissociative, detached way of seeing and feeling. At one stage she comments that: “I’m glad for the cameras now. I want sponsors to see I can hunt, that I’m a good bet” (The Hunger Games 2008, 199). This strategy of survival is highly dependent on maintaining the game modality; the corollary to which is that those who do not play the game successfully risk early annihilation. Haymitch, Katniss’s mentor, who helps broker the favours the viewers can bestow on their favourites, provides her with a healing balm after she is caught by a fireball. The Gamemakers have deliberately released this to liven up things because the one thing the Games must not do is “verge on dullness” (The Hunger Games 2008, 209). The wording here privileges the entertainment

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value of the games accentuating its dehumanising mechanisms. Later when Katniss rescues a near-death Peeta she gives him a kiss which earns them a “pot of hot broth” (The Hunger Games 2008, 316) from Haymitch for playing up to the star-crossed lovers’ role that has been constructed for them for the amusement of the watching crowd. This leaves Katniss in a state of confusion about her “real” feelings for Peeta, an emotion which lingers throughout the trilogy, until the very end. In Catching Fire, in preparation for their participation in the Quarter Quell games, Peeta and Katniss watch re-runs of Haymitch winning his hunger games event many years earlier. The scene provides graphic and disturbing detail of the deaths of the contestants (one of which was a close friend of Katniss’s mother), but Peeta’s interest lies more in Haymitch’s discovery of the force field at the bottom of a cliff in the arena which can be effectively harnessed as a weapon. This re-directs the discussion back to the game mode and arms them, as players of the game with a way of surviving the Quarter Quell. While Katniss is increasingly aware of the manner in which her life and that of others is being manipulated through the virtual modes, such understanding is repeatedly tested by the ways in which she is re-inserted into the medium either as a participant or a viewer, a constructed role that neutralises the self. In the final book of the trilogy, Mockingjay, Katniss is recruited by the leaders of the rebels as the titular mockingjay, symbolic figurehead of the rebels. In this role she is again placed into a virtual position despite the horror she witnesses in the bombing of a makeshift hospital which kills all the wounded men, women and children inside. Katniss is repulsed and nauseated by what she sees, and while her address to the cameras in relation to this incident— “President Snow says he‘s sending us a message? Well I have one for him….If we burn you burn with us”—comes, according to her from her “own being”, it is clear that the fine line between what she is and what she is made to represent is a delicate and often blurred one (Mockingjay 2010, 181). This is conveyed in a later scene as she watches the video promo of the bombing incident as it has been engineered by the rebels into an aesthetic form in the postediting phase. Katniss even applauds her own performance, in this gesture subconsciously acknowledging the transformation of the real war horrors into a seductive form of entertainment. According to Sue Scheibler, World War 2 themed video games, particularly those targeted at a youth audience, are “an ever growing and ever-expanding part of the multi-billion dollar video game industry”.

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Scheibler asserts that the military aids the game industry in their manufacturing of war games to provide an “authentic experience” of war. The corollary to this is that the video war games are then used by the military for recruitment and training purposes (Scheibler 2008, 87). It is arguable that these war games, while heightening the “reality” effect of war-time combat, also simultaneously disarm it because of their virtual formats. As Bayer notes, “virtual wounds can be healed easily, and virtual death is followed by the opportunity to play again”, and in a Baudrillardesque comment adds “nevertheless, both movies and computer games will shape the future perception of historical and contemporary wars, especially as the distinction between reality and virtuality will become increasingly difficult” (2003, 71). Terry Pratchett’s novel Only You Can Save Mankind (2004) anticipates this moment. It deals with the concept of war as a game, through Johnny who plays violent video war games and dreams of himself in war situations. Bradford et al. comment that “connections are made between the war and the video game ….both are things ‘happening on a screen somewhere’ and can be endlessly repeated or ‘played again’” (2008 176). Scheibler expresses concern about the camouflaging of the real in these war games when she asks: “what strategies are used to bring some awareness of the pain, suffering, loss, and cost of war?” (2008, 93). Through their televised forms, real war situations themselves threaten to become a form of simulacra, as Baudrillard notes in his comments on the media coverage of the Gulf War. However as Baudrillard also asserts, this does not necessarily mean that real suffering and horror are not still there. He writes: “The moralists of war, the holders of high wartime values should not be too discouraged: the war is no less atrocious for being only a simulacrum - the flesh suffers just the same, and the dead and former combatants are worth the same as in other wars” (1994, 37). Baudrillard’s contention here is not to deny the reality of war, rather to suggest that the way it is imaged and represented inevitably fails to fully capture its “profound reality”. Elaine Scarry engages with this idea, but also impugns official, mediatised representations of war as a deliberate construction of simulacra. She argues that there is intentional discursive concealment of the real suffering that occurs in the way war is managed, annotated and represented. In the contexts of war and torture the reality of the body in pain is subsumed into rhetorical structures “as if it were not there” (1985, 12). Thus official reportage often displaces the reality of individuals and their suffering by euphemistically transferring it to groups or inanimate objects. Moore, reading Scarry, notes that we hear of “weapons being disabled”, “casualties” or “Division Six being wounded” (Moore 1994,

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n.p.). There are many examples of the masking rhetorical structures to which Scarry alludes in the war-like situation that characterises the hunger games. Katniss euphemistically refers to her dead fellow tributes as “casualties” and “fatalities”; to her own victims as “my first kill” or the “boy from District 1” (The Hunger Games 2008, 294). The anthemic ritual organised by the authorities for the dead tributes each night of the games recalls the official memorialisation of soldiers during war-time and its capacity for disembodiment and discursive appropriation. In Mockingjay, the hunger games have been replaced by outright war between the Capitol led by President Snow and the Districts led by President Alma Coin of District 13. This war is waged as a game of brinkmanship as both sides make extensive use of video footage for propaganda purposes—trying to stay ahead of the game to leverage psychological as well as material victories. Thus the hunger games and later the “real” war in book three share some of the same space of representation; they are dramas directed by the authorities denying the reality of the sentient body in pain by processing it as a cipher in a strategic game of power. Collins also conjures the spectre of the TV talent show which in high measure lays claim to the performative and the entertaining rather than the real, while simultaneously purporting to evoke it. This is strongly enunciated in the hunger games in books one and two and it ghosts the action in book three, despite the latter’s move into a more sombre and reflective mode. Before the hunger games begin, each set of tributes undergoes training in specific weapons, appearing before a judging panel to exhibit their skills and compete for important scores which might better their chances; an interview on a chat show with MC Caesar Flickerman and a make-over by their personal stylist to win the favours and sponsorships of the crowd. Katniss and her fellow tribute Peeta are transformed by Cinna into costumed stand-outs, their outfits reflecting their coal mining District. Katniss describes her costume with great appreciation for its indexical elegance “a simple black unitard, shiny leather boots, fluttering cape and headpiece of orange yellow and red” (The Hunger Games 2008, 81). Katniss and Peeta’s triumphant entrance into the city centre prior to their first hunger games riding in their chariot with their capes and headpieces ablaze with synthetic fire is described by Katniss in ways that mute the reality of what this is a prelude to—their possible/probable deaths. Katniss comments: “As I gain confidence I actually blow kisses to the crowd. The people of the Capitol are going nuts, showering us with flowers, shouting our names….The pounding

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music, the cheers, the admiration work their way into my blood, and I can’t suppress my excitement” (The Hunger Games 2008, 85). This comment illustrates the seductiveness of the subject positions that the games format provides Katniss. She is equally impressed with the costumes Cinna designs for her for the Quarter Quell which transform her into “some unearthly being who looks like she might make her home in the volcano” (Catching Fire 2009, 248). In referring to herself in third person, she discloses that her identity is conferred by others, that she is a manufactured thing, an image with no referent: “Katniss the girl on fire has left behind her flickering flames and bejewelled gowns and soft candlelight frocks. She is as deadly as fire itself” (Catching Fire 2009, 248). In Mockingjay, she is again “made over” this time as symbolic figurehead for the rebels. The mockingjay, her District’s totem, is an appropriate symbol for Katniss as it signifies, like the hybridised bird on which it is based, an ability to adapt to and even change the circumstances for its own survival and that of others. Although she feels there is a closer alliance between the rebel/mockingjay image and her self-image, she observes, “As a rebel, I thought I’d get to look more like myself. But it seems a televised rebel has her own standards to live up to” (Mockingjay 2010, 71). Katniss’s references to the construction of her “self” as image, and the fragile relationship between the real and the virtual emerge as concerns in a number of YA narratives dealing with the increasing pervasiveness of computer technology within everyday life. Not all of these narratives are pessimistic about these relationships. In Cory Doctorow’s story “Anda’s Game” (2008), the main female protagonist Anda acquires a powerful selfimage by taking on an aggressive and ruthless female avatar whose main mission in the war-like game she plays is to kill as many of the enemy as possible. Equally however, her “real” self acquires ethical/moral perspective through her experiences both outside and inside the game and a capacity to know the difference between the virtual and the real. Victoria Flanagan’s analysis of the female body and subjectivity in this story notes the importance of this distinction when she writes: “The text’s construction of the digital world as a space in which young women can experience empowerment on both an individual and collective level is underpinned, however, by an acknowledgement that virtual reality is not a substitute for real life” (Flanagan 2011, 48). Narratives such as “Anda’s Game” raise important questions about the “potential for agency in a posthuman world of hyperreality” (Bradford et al. 2008, 177). The issues of agency and subjectivity are fundamental to most YA fiction, but in YA

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dystopian narratives they are more accentuated given the severely restrictive and oppressive social systems in which characters are often situated.

A “powerful metaphor for adolescence” As adolescent characters are central to the action in YA dystopian fiction, issues of identity formation and subjectivity are co-terminous with the bigger issues around war, dwindling world resources, plagues, social inequalities, terrorism and global warming. Hintz and Ostry contend that “dystopia can act as a powerful metaphor for adolescence” in that it entails “traumatic social and personal awakening” (2003, 9). Patricia Kennon likewise comments that the genre provides opportunity to “explore gender role stereotypes and their reformulation”, a matter that is at the heart of adolescent identity formation, and which is often implicated in the dystopian storyline (Kennon 2005, 40). Scott Westerfield’s Uglies series predicates its storyline on the potential for neuroscience to commodify the processes of aging and to homogenise generational gender identity. Its appeal, particularly for female readers lies in the ways in which Tally, the main female protagonist, resists and leads a rebellion against the practices around acquiring a normative femininity. In David Patneaude’s Epitaph Road (2010), the male half of the world’s population have been wiped out by a plague; Patrick Ness’s multi-award winning Chaos Walking trilogy, The Knife of Never Letting Go (2008); The Ask and the Answer (2009) and Monsters of Men (2010) establishes a world in which women have been deliberately destroyed. According to Laura Miller, The Hunger Games trilogy functions more convincingly as a metaphor for adolescence than as a text that is seriously engaged with more socially critical issues. Somewhat light-heartedly she claims that the narrative “becomes perfectly intelligible” if read as the “fever-dream allegory of the adolescent experience”, in which, amongst other things, “Everyone’s always watching you, scrutinizing your clothes or your friends and obsessing over whether you’re having sex or taking drugs or getting good enough grades, but no one cares who you really are or how you really feel about anything” (2010, 132). On a more serious level of engagement with the gender dimensions of the Hunger Games books, Katherine Broad argues that they ultimately endorse the rather conservative formula of heterosexual romance and marriage. Her contention is that while Katniss does the boy’s work and eschews the trappings of femininity, she is a reluctant hero. Ultimately she illustrates that while girls can be rebels, when they grow up “they must lose their independent agency and adopt properly gendered behaviour” (Broad 2013, 126-127). Whether one agrees or not with these

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views, Collins’s texts and others respond to difficult questions about the formation, coding and regulation of gendered and social identities, situating these questions within the specific experiences of their young protagonists. In the context of young adult fiction, dystopian and utopian writing relies heavily on the adolescent protagonist as a dualistic ideological and agential site; both “victim of oppressive forces and symbol of hope” (Kennon 2005, 40). The formula of the individual (youth) resisting or challenging the social order is a staple of most children’s and young adult literature. It is particularly potent in young adult dystopian narratives as it calls for a more wily and skilful individual who is no longer an innocent child victim. This is especially enticing for a young adult reader whose experience of the world through adolescence is often marked by dissatisfying and sometimes horrific confrontations with authority figures and social circumstances. In her analysis of three novels (Feed, The House of the Scorpion and Rash) dealing with dystopian futures predicated on the deleterious effects of global consumerism on a youth population, Abbie Ventura notes that because “the youth subjects are defined by and controlled through these conditions, their agency becomes necessary in order to realize a better future” (2011, 90). In being an agent of potential social change the young protagonist carries the weight of moral and political expectation in actively addressing the ills of society and the concomitant project of caring for, although not necessarily saving, an injured world. And for many young readers, confidence in and identification with the main female or male protagonist and their ability to intervene successfully in a situation largely “created and maintained by authoritarian and reactionary adults” (Kennon 2005, 40), presents itself as not only appropriate but even mandatory. Through the identificatory codes established between young adult protagonist and young adult readers, the latter can enact a victory over the dark forces even if that victory is contained within the pages of the book. As Springen notes: “In these stories, teen heroes use brains and courage to survive, despite their lack of power” (2010, 23) and this is what is attractive to younger readers. The protagonist learns about the self and others and must also make important “adult” decisions. Opportunities must be seized and action taken if a better world can be achieved, and this is often contingent on the protagonist’s own capacity for self-reflection and growth. Hintz and Ostry argue that the development of the young protagonist through his/her experiences in the dystopian context “mingles well with

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the coming-of-age novel’ which often involves “traumatic social and personal awakening” (Hintz and Ostry 2003, 9). In the Hunger Games trilogy, Katniss not only carries the emotional hopes of the reader, using her courage and wits to survive and even change the social situation, she also develops as a person through her experiences. The first book does the groundwork for constructing her as a suitable rebel against President Snow’s dystopian government, ending with her changing the rules of the game to ensure Peeta’s and her own survival. In this she enters a physical and psychological labyrinth, summoning the courage of Theseus and the cleverness of Ariadne, fighting to save the powerless victims of monsters such as President Snow. The other two books in the trilogy mesh her rebellion with a larger collective (underground resistance) to the social system. However, while there is something epic about Katniss’s battle with the forces of evil, there is also a very strong evocation of the “ordinary”. As are many books that feature young adolescent protagonists, Katniss is not drawn as an idealised character. While impoverished circumstances have made her resourceful and a survivor, she is also depicted as a petulant teenager, unforgiving of her mother, abiding by a romantic image of her father and often surly in her affection towards others. The outcome of her resistance both in its individualised forms and its more collective ones is by no means optimistic despite concluding with a romance, a marriage, and children signalled in the afterword to the narrative.

“More than a piece in their Games” Similar to other adolescent figures in YA dystopian fiction Katniss is clearly intended as the reference point for the moral, ideological and physical rebellion against an oppressive social order. She opposes President Snow’s regime in thought if not in deed from the beginning in her defiance of rules about hunting in the woods; in her trading of food and other material things on the black market; and in her private criticism, shared with her friend and hunting companion Gale and later with Peeta, of the regime’s punitive power strategies—tesserae, reaping, the hunger games. She begins to more fully comprehend the government’s power and cruelty when she participates in the hunger games. Against the panoptic strategies of the powerful, Katniss fights against being the property of the Capitol; like Peeta she wants to be “more than just a piece in their Games” (The Hunger Games 2008, 172). She is defiant of authority in the small tactics of rebellion she performs despite recognising that she has no real power of her own. The tactics of those with little power as ones that are

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perforce opportunistic, as Michel de Certeau argues, and must be taken “on the wing” (1984, xix) because they operate within the wider cultural and social environment which “others” them. Within the games arenas Katniss manages transient victories by seizing such opportunities. She works skilfully within the oppressive environment to protect herself and Peeta; and despite the killings that she is responsible for—Glimmer, and the girl from District 4, the boy from District 1—she begins to establish connection and compassion for them as well as for other victims in the game. Susan Sontag claims that compassion is “unstable” and “needs to be translated into action, or it withers” (2003, 101). As Katniss witnesses and is forced to participate in increasingly shocking and inhumane acts, her compassion is indeed “translated into action”. In the hunger games of the first book, she expresses some remorse in her killing of the Boy from District 1 (“somewhere his family is weeping for him” (The Hunger Games 2008, 294), and later seeks out his family to apologise (Catching Fire); she provides assistance to Rue from District 11 who reminds her of her sister Prim, and when Rue becomes another victim in the hunger games, Katniss finds a brief moment to mourn her and to reflect that her “death has forced me to confront my own fury against the cruelty, the injustice they inflict upon us” (The Hunger Games 2008, 286). The funeral rites she performs over Rue’s body also provide an alternative image of personal compassion to the official emblazoning of the dead tributes, and her care for Rue precipitates other acts of kindness. Once he knows of Katniss’s concern for Rue, Thresh, Rue’s ally, does not kill Katniss when he has the chance (The Hunger Games 2008, 358). Later when Thresh is killed, Katniss finds she is able to name what the actual game is—an official sanctioning of “murder” (The Hunger Games 2008, 375). In her article, “The Politics of Naming and the Development of Morality”, Gayle Pitman notes the power that is inherent in the act of naming (1999). Freedom or repression, validation or erasure depends largely on who does the naming and what that naming comes to signify. Recognizing and naming injustices is often the first step toward change and is a necessary precursor to social movements. When an experience, phenomenon, or idea is named, particularly the experiences of oppressed groups, the very act of naming gives that experience legitimacy and validation, whereas in its unnamed state it is much easier to ignore, dismiss, or deny that experience. (1999, 25)

As Katniss begins to name what the hunger games really are, to name and know the “players”, and to know the background and history of others in

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the Quarter Quell (in Catching Fire), so she is able to name injustice and to give her experiences and those of others a powerful legitimacy. Her opponents become more embodied to her and, unlike the animals she hunts in the woods at home, not as easy to kill without conscience or remorse. In the hunger games in the first book, she eventually kills Cato, the most brutal of the tributes out of pity not vengeance when he is physically atomised by cyborg wolf-hounds (composed of the bodies of the dead tributes), at the climax to the first novel. Katniss also defies the rules of the game by helping and refusing to kill Peeta, playing to the audience and outwitting Snow by threatening to swallow poisoned berries. Her actions compel the authorities to change the rules of the game. Katniss’s memories of her family and her father, mother, Prim and Gale punctuate her time in the arena and contribute to her growing sense of social and personal justice. Katniss also strives to own a self that is not caught in the performative roles demanded by the game. Her father is the one who names her Katniss, and gives her the advice about remaining true to her “self”. This advice sheets home towards the conclusion to the hunger games of the first book. At one stage Katniss questions who she really is given that her “identity” has always been determined by others, but post the hunger games she literally washes off her avatar/gamer identity and in her words “begins to transform back into myself” (The Hunger Games 2008, 450). This is, of course just the beginning of a process of self-actualisation that is never really finished, as Katniss comes to realise. Prior to the Quarter Quell games, Katniss claims, “I am beginning to know who I am” (Catching Fire 2009, 244). The tension around identity development and social pressure is exacerbated when Katniss is forced to play the role of Peeta’s lover. The construction is not of her choosing and she constantly recoils from its demands on her agency and emotions even while she recognises its political expediency in her fight against the Capitol. Her concerns about the relationship between the fabricated romance and her real feelings for Peeta are complicated by his declaration of love for her: “For a moment I am almost foolishly happy and then confusion sweeps over me. Because we’re supposed to be making up this stuff, playing at being in love, not actually being in love. But Peeta’s story has a ring of truth about it…could it all be true?”(The Hunger Games 2008, 301). Katniss’s involvement in the various simulacra impairs and impedes her capacity to experience the real, to recognise and embrace her “true” self, and to care for others, but it does not destroy it. Skinner and McCord note that the adolescent alliance between Katniss and Gale “becomes what Donald Kalsched (1996) calls

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an archetypal self-care system, developed in response to their own early physical and emotional starvation and loss” (2012, 111). This provides a strong foundation for Katniss’s later development, despite the setbacks she experiences along the way. Her traumatic involvement in the hunger games feeds her more mature understanding of and compassion for her family and her immediate society. In turn, her sense of care for others provides an emotional bulwark against the retributive killings of Snow, the horrors of what she has gone through, and is indexed in her changed relationship with her mother, with Prim’s beloved cat, Buttercup and finally in the resolution to her uncertain feelings about Peeta. The cat is not unlike Katniss in that it is edgy and difficult and loyal only to Prim; Katniss’s relationship with it signposts the development of a more empathetic and expansive self. At first she dislikes Buttercup, but when she finds it has wandered back to her family’s original home after the family has moved to their new one, Katniss takes the cat back to Prim, and after Prim’s death, forges a stronger affinity with it. Unlike the technorobot animals in the arena which replicate as well as distort the real, Buttercup is it “self”. In the second and third books of the trilogy, Katniss’s rising concern for the safety and survival of her loved ones motivates her to take a more active and community-based stance against her enemies, despite the fact that this involves making difficult choices about life and death. So while her involvement in the war situations heightens her moral awareness, it also complicates it. This is nowhere more disturbingly accented than in her insistence to be the one to kill Snow in exchange for allowing the rebels to use her as the mockingjay figurehead for their cause. While the opportunity arises, Katniss makes the decision to kill President Coin instead, especially when she learns that Coin has ordered the bombing that killed her sister Prim, and that Coin wishes to reinstate the hunger games to punish the children of the Capitol. Even though this act brings an end to the war, it adds to the emotional and moral battle Katniss carries well into her future.

The politics of representation While Katniss’s experiences of suffering, killing, carnage (through her forced participation in firstly the hunger games then later the civil war), measure the ways in which readers are invited into the narrative’s expanding moral centre, there remains the question of the textual representation of these ideas and whether the entertainment levels of the

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trilogy outweighs its moral messages. As the young adult reader is so crucially addressed as mature witness to relentless scenes of violence and catastrophic events in much YA dystopian fiction, there is high expectation that they will read these representations in serious and reflective ways. Broad (2013) asserts that only the adult readers of the Hunger Games seem to be more interested in the weighty concerns of the texts; responses from many youthful fans tend to suggest that they see it as an action-packed game of good versus evil, with a compelling romantic triangle at its heart. Spin-off merchandise from the books and the film series include video-games in which players are invited to be Katniss avatars pitting their skills against Snow-like adversaries. There is even a publication called The Unofficial Hunger Games Cookbook: From Lamb Stew to Groosling by Emily Ansara Baines, inviting readers to follow her recipes based on the food characters eat from the “workers from the Seam” to the “socialites of the Capitol” (2012, 1). Such responses risk perpetuating the games/ entertainment aspects of the texts and miss the point. But in another way, they also prove it. As pursued in this chapter, the Hunger Games series expresses Collins’s concern about the ways in which young people’s lives are dominated by the virtual to the point where they are invited to treat the virtual and the real as equivalents, thereby reducing any capacity to make physical and moral distinctions between them. This is Baudrillard’s warning about war and its representational forms, and it is also inherent in Susan Sontag’s comment that “real battles and massacres filmed as they unfold have been a routine ingredient of the ceaseless flow of domestic, small-screen entertainment (my italics)” (2003, 21). In an article on the release in the media of photographs and video footage of the torture and humiliation of prisoners by American soldiers in the Abu Ghraib prison, Dauphinee questions the use of aesthetic technologies that are used to articulate resistance to specific atrocities and acts of war which involve pain and suffering. In the visual display of tortured and suffering bodies, Dauphinee writes that the “body in pain is thus produced as an aesthetic visual image, a symbolic icon that stands in for itself as the referent object of political violence” (2007, 140). In other words there is not enough evidence of a referent that might lie outside or even within the textual image to guide the viewer towards the “correct” interpretation of it. Like Baudrillard’s simulacra—it references only itself. Dauphinee concludes that there is no “ethically pure way to circulate these images” by those who wish to use them to provide an oppositional politics to war, in that their circulation cannot guarantee the desired consequences.

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While acknowledging that there is no final solution to this dilemma, Dauphinee suggests that there should be more interrogation of how why and with what effects writers, photographers, filmmakers employ aesthetic practices in resistance efforts and to “ask ourselves what our answers might mean for others” (2007, 149). That said, there are of course other young YA readers of texts such as the Hunger Games as well as young players of violent video games that are not “passive and uncritical consumers who are easily led” (Beavis 1998, n.p.). Walkerdine, Beavis and others believe this is too simplistic a view, moreover it homogenises the YA reader. They call for a more nuanced analysis of the ways in which the range of young viewers and readers engage with texts (computer games, books, and films), the subject positions created for them through youth culture discourses, and the connections between their participatory habits and the real world. Sontag is also more hopeful. She eschews the suggestion that exposure to violent and horrific images, particularly in war-like situations necessarily leads to passive responses which contribute to the erasure of real pain and suffering. She argues that those images “showing something at its worst”, can be productively “didactic” and invite an “active response” (Sontag 2003, 81). Indeed Sontag implies that to shock, and thereby accuse and possibly to alter conduct is the ethical as well as aesthetic duty of the photograph/artist/writer who deals with the difficult and ugly aspects of people in conflict and crisis (Sontag 2003, 81). In the Hunger Games trilogy Collins has not shirked from the challenges of the approach she has taken, even if some of her readers are more highly entertained rather than seriously engaged.

The way home Bradford et al. assert that in many YA dystopian texts, “family is represented as a social construct and a necessity” (2008, 153); moreover it is often “the end goal of utopia and the reason for social change” (Broad 2013, 120). For some critics, this casting of the family as the haven against the world’s ills is a potentially conservative one which can reinforce patriarchal family structures and endorse traditional gender roles rather than lead to more equitable social structures. In her discussion of a number of YA dystopian texts that focus on empowered female characters who have the “potential for creating new configurations of spatial politics and new visions of future societies”, Patricia Kennon finds that such attempts are overshadowed and “indeed overwhelmed” by the ideological pressure”

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of the home and “patriarchal authority” (2005, 48). The Hunger Games trilogy colludes with this paradigm, concluding with an image of the heterosexual family—Katniss, Peeta and their children—as the “reason for social change”. The birth of children at the end of a narrative is often a staple trope of hope, signalling a fresh start and a new life. Featured as a closing symbol of the Hunger Games it provides thematic symmetry, counterbalancing the deaths of the young people in the first book. Katniss chooses “rebirth instead of destruction” (Mockingjay 2010, 453); Peeta’s (Pieta’s?) peaceful path not Gale’s war-like one. Her eventual marriage to Peeta is, as Katherine Broad notes, a predictable choice of the private and domestic space over the public world of politics and war. While this can be read as a conservative ending, with Katniss trading her bow and arrows for kitchen utensils, it is by no means a conclusive one. Katniss knows that it is important to tell her children the truth about the past even if it means revealing her own role in its horrors, and there is no guarantee of utopia in doing this. Dauphinee argues that to “imagine the pain of others” is important but that it “can only find an imperfect voice in rupturing moments” (2007, 146). Perhaps this is what dystopian writing does best and what Katniss’s story to her children will do—it invites us, through rupturing moments to imagine the pain of others. At various junctures throughout the Hunger Games trilogy there is a clear call to witness the recycling of war’s horrors and atrocities, expressed most potently in the cyborg monsters made from recycled parts of the bodies of the young dead tributes at the end of the first hunger games. Even after the war has ended, the rebel victory assured, and the arenas and hunger games destroyed, that “imperfect” voice reminds us of the real legacy of wars in the personal losses and post-traumatic stress suffered by Katniss and others and in the ways in which young people like Gale embrace the warrior identity offered by war. The final truth is that painful consequences endure long after the war is over.

Conclusion Philip Reeve is critical of the tendency in recent YA dystopian writing to confirm the worst aspects of humanity without offering a redemptive vision. He laments somewhat whimsically that “optimism has become so hopelessly quaint that we can no longer allow ourselves even to imagine a better future” (2011, 36). But while some young adult dystopian texts might not provide the “happy ever after” or the alternative utopian social vision Reeve wistfully seeks, it is evident that dystopian texts imply and even enact transformative and redemptive moments, offering “a Foucauldian

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alternative of Utopian spaces and enclaves within the reigning dystopia of the system” (Jameson 2006, 17). This is the claim in New World Orders in which it is argued that the good work of YA critical dystopian narratives is to challenge “hegemonic structures of political power and totalising ideologies by revealing the ways in which human needs and agency are restrained by existing institutional, social, and cultural arrangements” (Bradford et al. 2008, 16). To change reality, even fictionally, is of course far more difficult. As with many popular fields of cultural production, YA texts are “crucially implicated in shaping the values of children and young people” (Bradford et al. 2008, 2). The roles of young protagonists in dystopian texts are therefore instructively anchored to the moral and social tasks of the narrative, providing an important anodyne to a world wounded largely by uncaring adults and their destructive tendencies. Bradford et al. argue that “it is through discoursal features and narrative strategies that the texts construct subject positions for young readers assumed to be the decisionmakers and citizens of the future’” (2008, 77). Thus the “work” of dystopian texts for YA readers is significant and serious, perhaps even unashamedly didactic, as they claim attention and imaginative commitment, as the Hunger Games trilogy does, to what really matters, and what it means to be a good human being living productively with others.

Works Cited Anderson, Matthew.Tobin. 2002. Feed. Cambridge, MA: Candlewick Press. Atwood, Margaret. 1986. The Handmaid’s Tale. New York: Anchor Books. Bacigalupi, Paolo. 2011. Ship Breaker. New York: Little, Brown. Baines, Emily Ansara. 2012. The Unofficial Hunger Games Cookbook: From Lamb Stew to Groosling. Avon, MA: Adams Media. Bayer, Martin. 2003. “Playing War in Computer Games: Images, Myths and Reality.” In Myths and reality in War and Virtual War, edited by R. Westphal Jnr., 71-85. Oxford: Inter-disciplinary Press. Baudrillard, Jean. 1994. “The Precession of Simulacra.” In Jean Baudrillard: Simulacra and Simulation, translated by Sheila Faria Glaser, 1-42. USA: University of Michigan. Beavis, Catherine. 1998. “Computer Games: Youth culture, resistant readers and consuming passions.”

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http://publications.aare.edu.au/98pap/bea98139.htm Blasingame, James. 2009. ‘An Interview with Suzanne Collins’. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy 52.8: 726. Bradford, Clare, Kerry Mallan, John Stephens and Robyn McCallum. (Eds). 2008. New World Orders in Contemporary Children’s Literature: Utopian Transformations. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Broad, Katherine. 2013. “‘The Dandelion in Spring’: Utopia as Romance in Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games trilogy.” In Contemporary Dystopian Fiction for Young Adults: Brave New Teenagers, edited by Carrie Hintz, Balakia Basu and Katherine Broad, 117-130. New York and London: Routledge. Collins, Suzanne. 2008. The Hunger Games. London: Scholastic. —. 2009. Catching Fire. London: Scholastic. —. 2010. Mockingjay. London: Scholastic. Curry, Alice. 2013. Environmental Crisis in YA Fiction: A Poetics of Earth. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Dauphinee, Elizabeth. 2007. “The Politics of the Body in Pain: Reading the Ethics of Imagery.” Security Dialogue 38.2: 139-155. De Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall. Berkley: University of California Press. Doctorow, Cory. 2008. “Anda’s Game.” In The Starry Rift: Tales of New Tomorrows, edited by J. Strahan, 173-206. New York: Penguin. Farmer, Nancy. 2002. The House of the Scorpion. New York: Antheneum. Fitting, Peter. 2010. “Utopia, dystopia and science fiction.” In The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature, edited by Gregory Claeys, 135- 153. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Flanagan, Victoria. 2011. “Girl Parts: The Female Body, Subjectivity and Technology in Posthuman Young Adult Fiction.” Feminist Theory 12.1: 39-53. Foucault, Michel. 1995. Discipline and Punish: the birth of the prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage. Henthorne, Tom. 2012. Approaching the Hunger Games trilogy: a literary and cultural analysis. Jefferson, Nth Carolina: McFarlane and Company Inc. Hintz, Carrie and Elaine Ostry. 2003. Utopian and Dystopian Writing for Children and Young Adults. New York: Routledge. Hintz, Carrie, Balakia Basu and Katherine Broad, eds.2013. Contemporary Dystopian Fiction for Young Adults: Brave New Teenagers. New York and London: Routledge. Huxley, Aldous. 1932. Brave New World. London: Chatto and Windus.

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Jameson, Fredric. 2006. “The Antimonies of Utopia.” In Imagining the Future: Utopia and Dystopia, edited by Andrew Milner, Matthew Ryan and Robert Savage, 15-36. Melbourne: Arena. Kennon, Patricia. 2005. ‘“Belonging”’ in Young Adult Dystopian Fiction: New Communities Created by Children.” Papers 15.2: 40-49. Ketteler, Judy. 2010. “The labyrinth re-visited: a Greek myth is transported to the future.” The Costo Connection 25.7: 55. Levitas, Ruth. 1990. The concept of utopia. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Levitin, Sonia. 1999. The Cure. California: Harcourt Brace. Lowry, Lois. 2000. Gathering Blue. New York: Houghton Mifflin. Miller, Laura. 2010. “Fresh Hell.” The New Yorker 86.7: 132. Moore, Pamela. 1994. “Scarry, Elaine: The Body in Pain.” Literature Annotation http://litmed.med.nyu.edu/Annotation?action=view&annid=309. Muller, Vivienne. 2012. “Virtually Real: Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games Trilogy.” International Research in Children’s Literature 5.1: 51-63. Ness, Patrick. 2008. The Knife of Never Letting Go. Massachusetts: Candlewick Press. —. 2009. The Ask and the Answer. Massachusetts: Candlewick Press. —. 2010. Monsters of Men. Massachusetts: Candlewick Press. Orwell, George. 1950. Nineteen Eighty-Four. New York: Signet Classic Painter, Judith. 2012. “Alliances in The Hunger Games.” The Geography Teacher 9.2: 56-59. Papastephanou, Marianna. 2008. “Dystopian Reality, Utopian Thought, and Educational Reality.” Studies in Philosophy and Education 71.23: 89-102. Patneaude, David. 2010. Epitaph Road. New York: Egmont. Pitman, Gayle E. 1999. "The politics of naming and the development of morality: Implications for feminist therapists." Women & therapy 22.2: 21-38. Pratchett, Terry. 2004. Only You Can Save Mankind. New York: HarperCollins. Reeve, Philip. 2011. “The Worst is Yet to Come.” School Library Journal 57.8: 35-36. Samball, Kay. 2003. “Presenting the Case for Social Change: The Creative Dilemma of Dystopian Writing for Children.” In Utopian and Dystopian Writing for Children and Young Adults, edited by Carrie Hintz and Elaine Ostry, 163-178. Routledge: New York and London.

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Sargent, Lyman Tower. 1994. “The three faces of utopianism revisited.” Utopian Studies 5.1: 1-37. Scarry, Sue. 1985. The Body in Pain: the Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Scheibler, Sue. 2008. “Experiencing war the video game way.” In War: Interdisciplinary Investigations, edited by Julia Boll, 87-94. Oxford: Inter-disciplinary Press. Sedgwick, Marcus. Floodland. London: Orion. Simmons, Amber. 2012. “Class on Fire: Using The Hunger Games Trilogy to encourage social action.” Journal of Adolescents & Adult Literacy 56.1: 22-34. Skinner, Margaret and Kailyn McCord. 2012. “The Hunger Games: A conversation Jungian and Literary Perspectives on Violence, Gender and Character Development.” Jung Journal: Culture &Psyche 6.4: 106-128. Sontag, Susan. 2003. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Picador, Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Spisak, April. 2012. “What makes a good Dystopian Novel?” The Horn Book Magazine 88.3: 55-60. Springen, Karen. 2010. “Apocalypse Now: Tales of Dystopia.” Publishers Weekly 257.7: 21-24. Suvin, Darko. 1973. “Defining the literary genre of utopia: Some historical semantics, some genology [sic], a proposal, and a plea.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 6.2: 121–45. Treggiari, Jo. 2011. Ashes, Ashes. London: Scholastic. Ventura, Abbie. 2011. “Predicting a Better Situation? Three Young Adult Speculative Fiction Texts and the Possibilities for Social Change.” Children’s Literature Quarterly 36.1: 89-103. Walkerdine,Valerie. 1999. “Violent Boys and Precocious Girls: regulating childhood at the end of the millennium.” Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood 1.1: 3-23. Westerfield, Scott. 2005. Uglies. New York: Simon Pulse. Weyn, Suzanne. 2010. Empty. New York: Scholastic Press. Widdicombe, Toby. 2006. “Margaret Atwood, Doughnut Holes and the Paradox of Imagining.” In Imagining the Future: Utopia and Dystopia, edited by Andrew Milner, Matthew Ryan and Robert Savage, 295318. Melbourne: Arena. Zipes, Jack. 2003. “Utopia, Dystopia, and the Quest for Hope.” In Utopian and Dystopian Writing for Children and Young Adults, edited by Carrie Hintz and Elaine Ostry, ix-xi. New York: Routledge.

CHAPTER FOUR STAKING AND RESTAKING THE VAMPIRE: GENERATIONAL OWNERSHIP OF THE VAMPIRE STORY LESLEY HAWKES

The vampire has become a cultural icon of contemporary Western society. It no longer merely exists on the margins of society but has become incorporated into mainstream life. There are novels, films, games, cartoons, advertisements, comics, rock-bands, television shows and even fashion labels that draw upon the cultural knowledge surrounding vampires to create a connection with audiences as well as sell products. Of course, the large majority of these audience members do not want to connect or meet up with actual real vampires, but rather they want to connect with the connotations the vampire as a brand brings with it. Some of these connotations include seduction, desire, rebellion, eternal youth and danger. There would be very few people who do not know, at least, some of the rules and conventions of vampirism. Even if people have not read a single vampire story, they still know of these conventions through their exposure to, and experience with, popular culture. This exposure begins at a very early age with The Count von Count from Sesame Street often being the first encounter children have with a vampire-like character. The Count has been a part of Sesame Street since 1972. On this television show, The Count is represented as being human in his mannerisms and is not constructed to be a scary encounter for younger children but rather is meant as a way to introduce children to the joys of counting. However, even in this educational children’s program, and even though The Count is never directly referred to as a vampire, there are references to conventions of vampirism. The Count lives in a castle, has fangs, wears a cape, has no reflection and is surrounded by bats. Interestingly, the counting vampire is not a new convention, but harks back to superstitions that believed that, to slow a vampire down, the victim

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was meant to throw grain, rice or wafer crumbs at it. Ann Miller and John Mitchenson in their article “QI: Quite Interesting Facts About Vampires” find that vampires “suffer from arithmomania—they love to count” (2012, np).The vampire supposedly has an obsessive need to count and has to stop and count each grain thrown in its path, giving the victim the chance to escape. Marcia Lusted says this belief comes from China: “According to legend, a vampire could not pass by a sack of rice without counting every grain, so it would keep them busy and protect living people from their presence” (Lusted 2010, 16). It is unlikely that the producers planned it but The Count Von Count is one of the only representations of a contemporary vampire who still follow this convention. Of course, the vampire, as a supernatural entity, has existed for thousands of years with oral stories, myths and legends all filled with references to vampires. Brian Frost finds that there are mentions of vampires and the “undead” in many stories from around the globe and he cites examples from Norse, Anglo-Saxon, Greek, Roman, Egyptian and Babylonian cultures just to name a few (Frost 1989, 6). Frost highlights how the figure of the vampire has haunted and intrigued people through the ages: “By many names, and in a host of disparate guises, the vampire has been known to men of all nations throughout history” (1989, 3). There have been other supernatural beings that have attracted our attention but as Bernard Beck says, “vampires are different. Among all the monsters, demons, and horrors in popular culture that have amused us for centuries, vampires stand out as an unusual menace, attractive and erotic in their deadliness” (2011, 90). Beck’s point highlights the dual nature of the vampire: it is appealing and alluring as well as repulsive and threatening. The vampire is a blend of danger and desire. Other monsters may fill us with horror and some of them (such as Frankenstein’s monster) may even evoke our sympathy, but it is the vampire who seductively entices us into their forbidden world. While Bram Stoker’s Dracula, published in 1897, is the best known of all vampire stories, it was not the first literary representation and Dracula uses some tropes and conventions that earlier stories had started to put into place. Before Stoker’s Dracula, there was John William Polidori’s The Vampyre in 1819 which had put into play the idea that the vampire could come from noble blood. Before Polidori’s story most incarnations of vampires had them coming from the peasant classes: the real significance of this innovation was that ever since medieval times the vampire had been represented in folklore as an uncouth, disease-ridden

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peasant, and only with the publication of Polidori’s story did the vampire acquire a romantic image. (Frost 1989, 38)

Polidori’s vampire, Lord Ruthven, was of noble breeding and an expert seducer of all those around him: a nobleman more remarkable for his singularities, than his rank. He gazed upon the mirth around him, as if he could not participate therein. Apparently, the light laughter of the fair only attracted his attention, that he might by a look quell it, and throw fear into those breasts where thoughtlessness reigned. (Polidori [1819] 2009, 17)

Polidori’s story began as part of the famous ghost writing competition in Lake Geneva in 1816 between Byron, Mary and Percy Shelley and Polidori. Bryon had come up with a short vampire story called “The Fragment” and this became the inspiration for Polidori’s story. The history of this story’s creation added to its interest and it was mainly read because it was thought that, at least in the early stages of its release, Lord Byron was the author and the inspiration for Lord Ruthven and the public was eager to read anything relating to Lord Byron: “the vampire was not just born in the novel but given an instant popular audience” (Twitchell quoted in Williamson 2005, 36). Christopher Frayling calls Polidori’s The Vampyre “the first story successfully to fuse the disparate elements of vampirism into a coherent literary genre” (1992, 108). Around the same time there was also Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Christabel. Coleridge had written the first section of the poem in 1797 and the second in 1800, but it was only published in 1816. Coleridge’s poem raises issues of supernatural eroticism and desire. These Romantic texts, especially those in Polidori’s story, give modern readers the Byronic traits of the vampire: “images of glamorous outsiderdom, morose fatalism, social and artistic rebellion, and, crucially for twentieth-century developments of the myth, a subversive posture and notorious fame that prefigures much modern-day stardom” (Williamson 2005, 38). Many of our contemporary vampires have far more in common with Lord Ruthven, or more specifically Lord Byron, than they do with Dracula. These texts gave the public a taste for the vampire story and began the evolution of the vampire genre. James Malcolm Rymer’s huge and sprawling novel Varney the Vampire also established vampire tropes that Stoker drew upon for Dracula. Rymer’s story began its life in cheap pamphlet form but was published in novel form in 1847. Sir Francis Varney is the name of Rymer’s vampire and he can walk in the sunlight and eat and drink as a human would. The novel keeps shifting between the idea that Varney is an

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evil heartless creature, to one where Varney is a misunderstood and sympathetic character. It appears Rymer could not make his mind up on which direction to take Varney so he took him in both. At the end of the story, Varney throws himself into Mount Vesuvius rather than remain a vampire. Rymer’s description of Varney does announce some of the lasting characteristics of a vampire: The figure turns half round, and the light falls upon the face. It is perfectly white—perfectly bloodless. The eyes look like polished tin; the lips are drawn back, and the principal feature next to those dreadful eyes is the teeth—the fearful looking teeth—projecting like those of some wild animal, hideously, glaringly white, and fang-like. (Rymer 2012, 14)

However, it is Dracula that has remained the key vampire text and it is the one that has become the bench-mark on vampire conventions. It provides a set of conventions that people use in order to gain cultural knowledge and cultural expertise in judging other representations of the vampire. Frost says Dracula “has systemized the rules of literary and cinematic vampirology for all time” (1989, 52). In Dracula, Stoker created a fictional archetype as well as a popular icon: Within, stood a tall old man, clean-shaven save for a long white moustache, and clad in black from head to foot, without a single speck of colour about him anywhere. He held in his hand an antique silver lamp, in which the flame burned without chimney or globe of any kind, throwing long, quivering shadows as it flickered in the draught of the open door. The old man motioned me in with his right hand with a courtly gesture, saying in excellent English, but with a strange intonation:“Welcome to my house! Enter freely and of your own will!” He made no motion of stepping to meet me, but stood like a statue, as though his gesture of welcome had fixed him into stone. The instant, however, that I had stepped over the threshold, he moved impulsively forward, and holding out his hand grasped mine with a strength which made me wince, an effect which was not lessened by the fact that it seemed as cold as ice— more like the hand of a dead than a living man. (Stoker [1987] 1999, 2526)

In this description of Jonathan Harker’s first encounter with Count Dracula we can see many of the now well-known vampire conventions: the vampire as a gentleman, the vampire as having a strong accent and wearing a black outfit, the vampire as having cold skin and having an association with antiques and history, as well as the vampire having the

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need to be invited into a home. There are some less followed characteristics of vampirism: the vampire as an old man and the vampire having a moustache. There is also a description that, while accepted in Dracula, is mocked in a later vampire incarnation: the vampire as statue. These tropes will be discussed in detail later in the chapter, but at this stage it is worth noting the connotations that come up when the word “vampire” is mentioned in contemporary society is a blend of Stoker’s stoic vampire, Rymer’s confused vampire, and Polidori’s Byronic vampire. Ken Gelder reminds us that there is not “one Dracula, but many Draculas, which compete with each other for attention” (Gelder 1994, 65). I would suggest that this is because there has never been one definitive vampire but from the beginning the fictional vampire has blended and absorbed different representations. As stated, Dracula was published in 1897 and the reviews from the time indicate that some readers found the novel rather perplexing. Reviewers seemed unsure how to approach it or how to read it. A review in the Manchester Guardian, 1897, says: “It is, however, an artistic mistake to fill a whole volume with horrors. A touch of the mysterious, the terrible, or the supernatural is infinitely more effective and credible” (reprinted in Niland 2012, 1). This review indicates that the genre we now take for granted as the vampire story was not so easy to categorise when it first came out. At the time of its publication there were other horror stories and other stories with “undead” creatures in them but Stoker’s story did not seem to fit neatly into these categories. I raise this point to show that, from its beginnings, the vampire as a genre and form has been hard to put a boundary around. Even though we now turn to Dracula for rules and conventions, at the time it was viewed differently. The vampire genre was not yet established and as such there were no “lore” to judge Dracula against. Bram Stoker’s novel has never been out of print since its first publication, however, as Milly Williamson discovers: large numbers of working-class Victorians probably would not have read Dracula as soon as it was published, because the first edition hardback copy would have been too expensive at six shillings (although some might have read it through lending libraries). However, the publisher, Constable, brought out a paperback edition three-and-a-half years later in 1901 that was aimed at a less affluent readership at six pence a copy-not significantly dearer than a penny dreadful-indicating that there was a sizeable readership for the novel beyond the well-to-do middle classes. (Williamson 2005, 21)

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Williamson’s point is an important one because it touches on the idea that many critics raise: that Dracula, and the many vampire stories that follow it, are stories for the middle classes and the concerns the stories raise are middle class concerns. It was in the twentieth century that Dracula became a far more popular icon, because the story became accessible to more people. The first two decades of the twentieth century saw the continued publication of new vampire stories in the United Kingdom, but it was the thirties in the United States when there was a flourish of new vampire stories. This expansion was due to the success and demand for pulp fiction. The most popular of these pulp fiction magazines was Weird Tales. Brian Frost describes this magazine as: A superior specimen of the often-derided pulp magazines, which in the years between the two world wars provided low-priced entertainment for millions of Americans. During its thirty-year life span “The UniqueMagazine” as it was subtitled, published an amazing variety of fiction, from old-fashioned tales of Gothic horror to futuristic weird-scientific yarns. As was to be expected, out of the many themes exploited none were more popular than vampirism; and over the years literally hundreds of vampire stories, featuring every conceivable kind of vampiric manifestation, appeared in the magazine’s pages. (Frost 1989, 64)

Frost’s comment, along with Williamson’s, highlights how vampires crossed classes in popularity. Adding to the cheaper publications of vampire stories were the movie and theatre adaptations and these lifted the vampire to new heights in popularity. Ken Gelder in Reading the Vampire finds that world-wide there have been over 3,000 vampire or vampirerelated films (Gelder 1994, 86). This is an incredible figure and shows the enduring popularity of this genre. It is of interest to note that vampire stories have become a genre that is especially attractive to younger people, especially tweens and teenagers. A lot of research has already been undertaken on the way each new generation of younger people have their own vampire story. Nina Auerbach is the major researcher in this area and she says “because they are always changing, their appeal is dramatically generational” (1995, 5). She goes on to say: To the jaded eye, all vampires seem alike, but they are wonderful in their versatility. Some come to life in moonlight, others are killed by the sun; some pierce with their eyes, others with fangs; some are reactionary, others are rebels; but all are disturbingly close to the mortals they prey on. (Auerbach 1995, 5)

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The vampire also becomes a space where the younger generations can voice their cultural knowledge. Ken Gelder in Reading the Vampire finds that in vampire stories the heroes are: often (male) teenagers who are immersed in the “lore” of popular culture: the more “lore” one knows, the more equipped one is to do battle with vampires. This kind of popular narrative makes a “scientific” knowledge of the details of popular culture redemptive. (1994, 35)

Gelder’s point is an important one as it goes some way in explaining why younger people are attracted to these stories. The vampire story becomes a space for young adults to demonstrate and take ownership of popular cultural knowledge and at the same time, prove the value of their particular popular knowledge. Gelder goes on to say: Indeed, vampire fiction is peculiar in this sense, although it is flexible in so many other ways, it depends upon the recollection and acting out of certain specific ‘lores’ for its resolution—that vampires must be invited into the houses before they can enter, that they are repelled by garlic, that they cannot cross rivers, that they need their own earth to sleep on and so on. (1994, 35)

This chapter will explore the way the vampire becomes a space where younger audiences feel a sense of agency and ownership. While some contemporary vampire texts play with these conventions, they still require the audience to have knowledge of these conventions as a point of reference. For example, in Blade (1998), the vampire can day-walk and he chooses not to drink human blood. Audiences viewing this movie know the conventions and rules of the genre and it is up to them to decide how far these rules can be followed, transgressed or subverted in any given representation. In this case, the audiences accepted that a vampire may decide to take a serum rather than drink human blood, and they embraced these changes. In the past, it may have been the adult scientists and or a group of rational adults within the story who resolved the vampire problem and implanted a sense of justice back into the world. Today, it is not only the story’s characters who decide the fate of the vampire, but the audience themselves who decide whether to let the vampire continue and what form it will take into the future. In this chapter, I will also discuss the notion that tensions can emerge in who has the right to have and use this cultural knowledge. A prime example of this tension is Twilight. Unease developed when it was thought that the future direction of the vampire was in the hands of young girls and women. Associated with this concern is the manner in which the vampire story is blended with other genres. For

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example, there have been action/horror/detective/and romance vampire stories just to name a few. It is the blending of vampire with romance that has caused the most concern for many vampire fans, and again, this may be because of the gender of romance readers. Nina Auerbach says “the most sophisticated and best-known experts on American popular horror insist that it is and always has been a boy’s game” (1995, 3). And there is some reluctance to let the cultural knowledge slip out of the boys’ hands and into young girls. At this point it may be a good idea to return to Ken Gelder’s quote about how the heroes in vampire stories are “often (male) teenagers who are immersed in the “lore” of popular culture: the more “lore” one knows, the more equipped one is to do battle with vampires (Gelder 1994, 35). In Twilight, it is not the young males who know the “lore” of popular culture but young girls. This gender concern may explain why very recently there has been a shift away from the vampire story and a move to the zombie story. The zombie is a far more male-oriented figure and the focus of zombies has never been emotional or anything to do with hearts or feelings. Richard Greene and Mohammad K. Silem in their book Zombies, Vampires, and Philosophy find that “for the vampire, knowledge that one is doing evil still remains as a concept, and with this knowledge comes the erotic charge of unheeded guilt. For the zombie, this is all a none-issue” (2010, xi). Zombies do not want to seduce you: they want to eat your brains. The vampire often ends its journey by getting a wooden stake driven through its heart. This act is meant to free the human body from the vampire bond and allow the human finally to be at peace. However, the heart is also symbolic of love and emotion and the stake through the heart can be seen as the end of links with unnatural love and longing. Although, in Dracula, when Lucy is killed, the heart and head are both destroyed: “I shall cut off her head and fill her mouth with garlic, and I shall drive a stake through her body” (Stoker [1987] 1999, 241). Arthur is the character who drives a stake through Lucy’s heart and Van Helsing and Jonathan are the ones who saw the “top off the stake, leaving the point of it in the body. Then we cut off the head and filled the mouth with garlic. We soldered up the leaden coffin, screwed on the coffin-lid, and gathering up our belongings, came away” (Stoker [1987] 1999, 260). The symbolic underpinnings of this gesture cannot be ignored. By this act, any connection with the vampire, rational or emotional, is destroyed and the world becomes logical, male and ordered again:

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Outside the air was sweet, the sun shone, and the birds sang, and it seemed as if all nature were tuned to a different pitch. There was gladness and mirth and peace everywhere, for we were at rest ourselves on one account, and we were glad, though it was a tempered joy. (Stoker [1987] 1999, 260)

In contemporary stories vampires are staked through the heart, zombies are shot in the head. As Max Brooks, writes in The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead, “the brain must be obliterated, by any means possible” (Brooks 2003, 20). But even in the zombie story, there has recently been a crossing over to the romance genre with zombies beginning to have feelings and emotions. In Warm Bodies (2013) a young male zombie named R falls in love with a female human named Julie after eating her boyfriend’s brains and inheriting his memories. The film is a paranormal romantic zombie comedy based on Isaac Marion’s 2010 novel of the same name. In an interview with Marion, Tara Smith says that she was worried the zombie was turning into a romantic vampire: When I first read the description of “Warm Bodies,” I admittedly cringed a bit. Like many others, I was a bit apprehensive that it was going to be “Twilight” for zombies. Thankfully, R wasn’t sparkly like Edward and Julie wasn’t a pathetic wimp like Bella, and I was pleasantly surprised with how much I liked the book and the movie. Like much great zombie fiction, your book is entertaining but also has a bigger message about the state of society. (Smith 2013, 1)

Smith’s comment reflects the idea that even though Warm Bodies is a romance it is not only about emotion but has a bigger message to share. Smith highlights that this zombie story is not at all like Twilight. Smith and Marion do not link the romance in Warm Bodies to Twilight or to the popular romance genre but to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (note the characters’ names: R and Julie). Smith says, Still, it is a romance, complete with “R and Julie” and even a balcony scene. Like the play, R and Julie brought about change and a healing in their respective populations, even if that was not their intent. Why did you decide to incorporate that story and those references into your novel?

Marion replies: It kind of just happened by accident, actually. I was fairly deep into plotting it when I noticed the ways my story had assembled itself around that classical arc, and I decided to run with it. To me, the Shakespeare

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Marion points out that his story has links with the classical arc of Shakespeare. It appears it is far more acceptable to have links with Shakespeare than with Meyer. Also, the fact that it is comedy takes away from any idea that it should be seen as a serious or permanent shift in genre convention. Marc Forster’s 2013 epic film World War Z, a film adaptation of Max Brooks’ The Zombie War (2006) starring Brad Pitt places the zombie genre firmly back into apocalyptic horror and firmly back onto male as hero ground. Meanwhile, the vampire story has no firm ground to plant itself firmly into. The vampire as character as become part of cultural capital and as Deborah Mutch finds “once a character becomes part of the cultural capital he or she will continually recur, changing appearance and meaning according to the concerns of the era, providing material for an endless series of homages, pastiches, rip-offs and reboots” (Mutch 2013, 22). It is not possible to look at all the representations of vampires so this chapter will focus on a number of key texts and programs that have been aimed at the teenage and youth market: Blade, Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, Twilight, Peeps, and True Blood. These texts have been chosen because not only do they represent some of the most dominant and popular contemporary vampire stories, but they also reveal the social and cultural engagement of their readers and viewers as well as tensions that emerge between them. Through an examination of these texts, it is possible to open a dialogue on how and why some vampire conventions are accepted and modified while others are dismissed as not being “real” vampire traits. Also of interest is how the rejection of certain attributes is not based solely in the limits or traditions of the story but rather in the power of those making the decision. John Fiske says: Popular discrimination, then, does not operate between or within texts in terms of their quality, but rather in the identification and selection of points of pertinence between the text and everyday life. This means that any one text can offer, potentially at least, as many relevances as there are different social allegiances of its readers. (Fiske 2010, 103)

The social allegiances can cause tensions to emerge over who has “rightful” ownership of the “lore” of popular vampire culture and who will make the decision of what shape the vampire will take in the future.

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Blade 1998, Blade 11 2002 and Blade: Trinity 2004 I begin the discussion of contemporary vampire stories with Blade. Matthew Beresford says that: after seventy years of vampire films, it was time for a change. The genre was becoming stale once more and socially was losing interest. The arrival, and success of Blade (1998) is a beacon in the darkness of the vampire myth. (Beresford quoted in 2008, 154)

The three Blade movies were based loosely on the Marvel Comics’ 1973/4 series by Marv Wolfman. The movies were commercially successful, especially Blade and Blade 11. These movies have a strong subculture fan-base and they also created very edgy and hyper-cool vampires and vampire-hunters. Each Blade movie has had a different director, and as such, each movie has a slightly different focus, however, all three screenplays were written by David Goyes. Blade (1998) was directed by Stephen Norrington, Blade 11 (2002) by Guillermo del Toro and Blade: Trinity by David Goyes (2004). In the movies the lead character of Blade is played by African American actor Wesley Snipes. Casting Snipes as Blade immediately places believability in Blade being seen as an action hero as Snipes had previously appeared in blockbuster action movies such as Passenger 57 (1992), Demolition Man (1993) and Money Train (1995). Blade is a special kind of vampire, a Dhampir, because he is a day-walker meaning he can walk in the day and not be affected by sunlight. He still has to wear dark sunglasses as he is sensitive to bright lights. His mother was bitten by a vampire while she was pregnant and as such has unwillingly passed the vampire virus onto her son. The only other vampire who is capable of day-walking is Drake, the ancient original leader of all vampires (Dracula connotations). Blade is set on revenging those who caused his mother’s death. There are purebloods or those vampires who have vampire parents and turned vampires who were bitten by vampires and turned. This divide between how people become vampire creates a strict hierarchy in the vampire-world. Vampires who are turned are not given as much value and power as those born vampires. These movies set up a clear separation between vampires. This idea is fleshed out in later vampire stories such as Twilight and True Blood. The vampires in Blade also have their own oral and written language which they consider to be the only “true” language. This language is called “vampire glyphs” and appears to be inherited through vampires’ memories. The language is often tattooed onto their bodies and graffiti of the language on a building signifies vampire dwellings.

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Jeffrey Weinstock in his book The Vampire Film: Undead Cinema finds the Blade films self-referential and the movies make many intertextual comments for the benefit of not only explicating material but also alerting the audiences to changes the movies are making to the genre. He says the films “elucidate clearly how its vampires compare with the popular conception and how they differ” (Weinstock 2012, 2). It is taken for granted that the people watching these movies know the “lore” of vampirism and will go along with and understand why the changes are being made. The vampires in these movies are made modern. They have tattoos, do graffiti, wear very modern clothes and listen to alternative dance music. Weinstock finds the Blade movies invest the genre with “a hipper-than-thou attitude and ultra-cool aesthetic” (2012, 69). It is not only the lead character of half-vampire, half-human who becomes a hybrid form in this story but also the story itself. These stories are a combination of action movie and vampire story. The first Blade movie opens with a vampire rave party scene, complete with pumping music and hypnotic dance moves. The party drug of choice for the vampires is human blood. Weinstock says: Blade, it is fair to say, is up-to-date with a vengeance and works to establish its edgy, hip ambience from the very first scene in which a hapless human victim is taken to a vampire “blood rave” at a slaughter house . . . The true spectacle at the rave, however, is not the rain of blood that cascades from the fire extinguishers to the pulsating beat of New Order but the intervention of Blade himself, the daywalker (Wesley Snipes), whose sculpted, sunglasses-clad, hyperbolically-masculine form moves confidently through the panicked vampire crowd wreaking havoc with both modern and modernized archaic weapons—guns that fire silver bullets and a silver sword (modified to accept only his grip) that reduce vampires instantly to cinders. (Weinstock 2012, 68)

Blade is a masculine representation of the vampire and the vampire hunter combined. His hybrid form gives him the hero status as well as having all the seducing characteristics of the vampire. His image is a combination of fighting super action hero and knight in shining armour. Greene and Silem find that vampires’ movements are stylish and elegant; when they move swiftly, they move with precision, not with lumbering, erratic motions, unless they are stupid and easy fodder for a vampire slayer. For the female vampire, moving smoothly and suggestively is in line with conventional femininity. But the male vampire’s graceful movements, intended to aid him in seducing his victim, blur the presumed line between masculine and feminine; men are not

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supposed to walk gracefully and lightly. The character of Blade cut through these feminine connections. He may be graceful and swift but this is because of his skill at martial arts not because of any female traits. (Greene and Silem 2010, 241)

The character of Blade gets past this female trait of fluidity as it is his skills as a martial artist that creates these graceful movements not any blurring of gender lines. Blade is male vampire and hunter in the one body. He is on the side on the humans but with the power and strength of the vampire. The Blade movies also represent a new breed of vampire hunter with science on his side, who comes equipped with increasingly sophisticated tools at his disposal. Weinstock says Blade “uses advanced technology both to control his own vampiric thirst and to pursue his quarry” (2012, 69). Blade as vampire is far removed from a Dracula figure, and as vampire-hunter is far removed from Van Helsing. There is a Van Helsing-like character in the Blade movies and that is Abraham Whistler. Whistler spends his time inventing cutting-edge weaponry to be used against vampires. The movies also bring into focus the use of science and technology for the good of humans. This technological and scientific material is not presented in a dry rational way as in many past vampire stories. The technology is far more James Bond-like with gadgets such as the silver sword that only accepts Blade’s hand or the machine guns that fire silver bullets. The three Blade movies are fast-paced and action paced. There is some back-story that explains why Blade is the lone figure he is and how he saved Whistler from a gang of vampires, but the majority of the movies is focused on martial arts fighting scenes and enacting revenge with modern weapons. These movies shifted the vampire and the vampire hunter into the technological savvy contemporary world: “Blade and Blade 11 kickstarted the vampire movie by adding an MTV aesthetic and ample doses of flamboyant violence” (Prince 2004, 1).

Buffy 1997–2003 While the Blade movies are very masculine in their depiction of vampires and vampire hunters Buffy: the Vampire Slayer is not. Twilight may be the vampire series that really explores the idea of vampire as boyfriend and eventually husband but Buffy: the Vampire Slayer had started the trend. This television series which ran from 1997 until 2003 also exposed how cultural knowledge is used in popular culture. In an interview with Noel Holston, the series creator Joss Whedon raises the

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idea that you don’t need to watch or read a text to be aware of its cultural value: Our viewership has never been as large as the awareness of us, Whedon acknowledged, adding that the show is certainly not designed to exclude anybody. I don't believe in exclusion. But at the same time, Buffy: the Vampire Slayer is not a show that some people are going to switch on, and that's just the way it is. (Holston 2003, 1)

So even though there may be people who choose not to watch the show they probably still “know” about the show through their exposure and experience with popular culture. It has to be remembered that it is not only teenagers who watch teen shows. Mary Celeste Kearney says “in order for teen shows to be viable, therefore, other age groups besides teenagers must watch them” (Kearney quoted in Levine et al. 2007, 18). In the case of Buffy it was tweens, teens and young adults who were watching the show. Robert Bibb and Lewis Goldstein (two of the WB’s Television Network co-presidents of marketing) have noted “we are the only network that has a bond with viewers between the ages of 13 and 34 on a daily basis” (Kearney quoted in Levine et al. 2007, 29). Buffy’s appeal crossed age barriers. There had been a teen movie of the same name in 1992 but it is the television series that achieved cult status. The series was also a critical success, winning three Emmy Awards, six Saturn Awards, a Hugo and a Golden Satellite (McLeod 2010, 175). Joss Whedon has stated that Buffy came into being because he had seen “too many blondes walking into dark alleyways and being killed. I wanted, just once, for her to fight back when the monster attacked, and kick his ass” (Whedon quoted in Williamson 2005, 76). The series is set in Sunnydale, California, and while the name suggests that a bright sunny story may unfold, this Sunnydale is Hellsmouth—a portal for evil creatures. The California in this series is not beach parties and sunshine. Sarah E. Skwire says Buffy is a: brilliant inversion of the generally accepted dynamic of fairytales both as tales and as pedagogical devices where sage-like adults instruct the young. Sunnydale, however, is populated by uncomprehending adults who are blind to, and foolishly trapped by, demonic dangers in contrast to wise children who see what adults cannot see and who understand the reality of these “imaginary” evils.” (quoted in Williamson 2005, 79)

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Buffy Summers is a young attractive girl who moves to a new school after being expelled from her old one and feels alienated from the society around her. The name “Summers” appears to suit the sunny California setting, but again the series highlights the many layers a name can have. What is interesting about Buffy is the lack of intrusion from the outside world. Beyond the school grounds, very few adult structures or institutions are mentioned. The rational institutionalised society is not going to come in and rescue Buffy or the victims. The placing of the Hellsmouth at Sunnydale High School takes the idea of school as hell and a frightening experience from a symbolic to a literal level. Students encounter the manifestation of all their fears at school and it is not the adults who come to their rescue but Buffy and her small group of friends who include Xander Harris and Willow Rosenberg. There is only one adult in this gang, Rupert Giles, who is aware of what is going on and his role is to guide Buffy in her tasks. This group calls itself “The Scooby-Gang” and is reference to the gang that solved crimes in the cartoon Scooby Doo. This connection is carried on throughout the show with Xander wearing Scooby Doo t-shirts and Buffy wearing a scarf (the way that Daphne used to on Scooby Doo). Sarah Michelle Gellar, who played Buffy, would go on to play Daphne in the Scooby Doo movies. Although Buffy, Giles, Xander and Willow were the core group, there were also other later members in the group such as Cordelia Chase and Daniel Oz Osbourne. Sharon Ross has noted that not only does the program “emphasize emotional bonds between women (and men who meet certain standards), it also highlights collective decision making as an indispensable aspect of heroism” (Ross 2004, 85). Buffy and her group work together to solve the problems of demons. Buffy may listen to Giles, but he has no more say than the younger members of the group. This is unlike the lone figure of Blade who may listen to Whistler, but only to gain technological information. Fiske finds that viewers turn certain shows into popular culture because they discover and then use “the relevances between it and their social experience” (Fiske 2010, 104). Teenagers found many relevances between Buffy and their own experiences. Levine et al. find that “over its seven-season run, Buffy the Vampire Slayer became a cultural phenomenon that epitomised trends in the production and reception of commercial television and offered provocative commentaries on matters of gender, sexuality, class, race, and age” (2007, 2). These issues were often discussed in terms of monsters and supernatural experiences but they were grounded in everyday lived experiences. As Noel Holston writes “ the Buffy episode in which our heroine and her classmate Cordelia were drugged by members of a fraternity-cult and almost fed to a reptilian

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demon was as harrowing a take on date rape as any TV movie or series has ever delivered” (Holston 2003, 1). Bethan Jones states that in relation to vampire stories in the last fifteen years, two female human characters have stood above all others and have created more debate about their roles, actions and decisions than any female character since Stoker’s Lucy Westenra: Buffy Summers and Bella Swan. (Jones quoted in Mutch 2013, 37)

Jones goes on to say that: Buffy extols independence and physical strength yet reinforces traditional, male dominated Western ideals of female beauty while the Twilight series emphasizes the role of men as protectors of women but makes it clear that Bella chooses her passive position. (Jones quoted in Mutch, 2013, 37)

I will discuss Bella Swan later in the chapter, but at this point I want to stress that Buffy may reinforce certain male standards of beauty but there is no denying she has agency, determination and an active rather than passive body. In Blade, the vampire/vampire-slayer is portrayed as a martial arts expert who is very edgy and “ultra-hip”. As stated by Prince this physicality and “flamboyant violence” (2006, 1) made the character very appealing to modern young audiences. However, when Buffy’s physicality is discussed it is usually in terms of her “beauty” and to raise the question of how such a young pretty girl can have so much physical strength. These questions are never raised in relation to a male vampire hunter. The viewers of Buffy, however, seem to be more interested in the story’s narrative. Sharon Ross finds that Overall, however, the show’s emphasis on physical strength often trumped any emphasis on femininity for fans. In other words, the fact that women can kick butt and still be pretty, while a point of pleasure for many viewers, was important only in so much as the “kicking butt” received more narrative weight than “being pretty.” (Ross 2004, 91)

Ross concludes her findings by saying that young girls take away two main messages from Buffy in connection with beauty: 1) 2)

Physical prowess is not masculine and therefore is a right of females rather than something appropriated, and that Female practical use of the body does not detract from one’s gendered position as a girl. (Ross 2004, 94)

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Most of the monsters and demons who appeared on Buffy were no match for her physical strength. This may seem “unrealistic” but this is also the case with the vampire hunters in other vampire stories. In this regard, then, Buffy follows the convention of vampire-hunter being stronger than the vampires they hunt. Many critics have also emphasised that Buffy’s emotional structures “have more in common with soap opera relationships than with most genre series” (Kaveney quoted in Williamson 2005, 76). The connection with soap opera is somehow meant to discredit the connection with the vampire genre. The creators of Buffy play with this criticism by having Spike, the bad-boy punk-like vampire in the series, becoming addicted to the soap opera Passions. Giles, the librarian and serious scholar, also admits that he has watched the soap opera with Spike. Spike also watches episodes of Dawson’s Creek. The vampire appears not to make the same value judgements against genres as some humans. The vampire Buffy falls in love with is Angel who was turned into a vampire at the age of 26 when he was living in Ireland. Angelus, the demon with the face of an angel, is a vampire with a soul. He is a tortured demon who is cursed to remember his past deeds and he must relive his guilt every day. He becomes part of the Scooby-Gang and helps destroy other vampires. Angel eventually leaves the Buffy series but the character remained. Angel gets his own television show running from 1999 until 2004. The show came into being because Buffy fans were reluctant to let the character of Angel go. The Angel series was presented as an almost crime/detective/PI series with Angel and Cordelia leaving Sunnydale and setting up Angel Investigations in Los Angeles. This company becomes almost semi-legal and offers a legitimate rational reason for its existence in having to solve a supernatural problem each week. In this series, the vampire becomes the logical detective. The audience for Angel in its first season was “slightly larger than that of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer” (McLeod 2010, 176). Buffy made many shifts in vampire lore. The vampire hunter became a young female who worked with her friends from her local school community to rid society of its evils and demons. Buffy and Blade also showed how the vampire hunters can be just as seductive as the vampire. However, more important is the fact that Buffy set in motion the idea that vampire can be both boyfriend and tortured soul.

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Peeps 2005 Scott Westerfeld’s highly popular and commercially successful 2005 Peeps novel is a mixture of medical thriller, science fiction and vampire story. In structure, it reminds the reader more of Michael Crichton’s medical thriller Next than a vampire story. On his official blog page, Westerfeld says before writing Peeps: besides getting a new take on the sunlight-impaired, my other big concern was that my vampires should actually make some sense as far as science goes. So I started doing some vampire research, reading a bunch of books about rats, parasites, bites and stings, and biology. (Westerfeld 2013, 1)

The story tells of Cal Thompson who is 18 when he is infected by the “peeps” parasite after having unprotected sex with a girl named Morgan Ryder. Morgan picked him up in a gay bar. One of the results of being infected with the parasite is Cal is always sexually aroused. He has to now hunt down his past girlfriends who he has infected and capture them. The girls are given medication which is meant to keep them under control and stop the parasite from spreading. Cal is watched over and directed by the “Night Watch” the official group who monitor all “peep” activity. The only solution to Cal stopping his spreading of the parasite is to abstain from sex. Westerfeld’s novel goes into a lot of scientific detail and history about how the parasite came into being and how and why it is spreading. There are chapters that explain in detail the history of different parasites. This gives the novel a CSI approach and the reader is introduced to forensic methods and findings. This method was also used in Blade and to a lesser extent in Buffy. The introduction of vampirism as parasite is an interesting one because “vampires are powerful not only because they inspire fear and terror in the living, but also because they escape from the troublesome human burdens of aging and sickness” (Forry quoted in Greene and Silem 2010, 237). The vampires in this novel are associated with sickness and those who have the parasite within them do not appear healthy creatures but sick and rat-like. However, Cal still thinks they look beautiful: I could see why the legends call them beautiful: that bone structure right there on the surface, like heroin chic without the bad skin. And a peep’s gaze is so intense. Adapted to the darkness, their irises and pupils are huge, the skin around the orbitals pulled back in a predatory face-lift, revealing

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more of the eyeballs. Like botoxed movie stars, they always look surprised and almost never blink. (Westerfeld 2005, 9)

Westerfeld’s description of peeps is quite similar to Stoker’s description of Dracula. However, Westerfeld’s novel offers an explanation as to why “peeps” look the way they do. Stoker does not: His face was a strong—a very strong—aquiline, with high bridge of the thin nose and peculiarly arched nostrils; with lofty domed forehead, and hair growing scantily round the temples, but profusely elsewhere. His eyebrows were very massive, almost meeting over the nose, and with bushy hair that seemed to curl in its own profusion. The mouth, so far as I could see it under the heavy moustache, was fixed and rather cruellooking, with peculiarly sharp white teeth; these protruded over the lips, whose remarkable ruddiness showed astonishingly vitality in a man of his years. For the rest, his ears were pale and at the tops extremely pointed; the chin was broad and strong, and the cheeks firm though thin. The general effect was one of extraordinary pallor. (Stoker [1987] 1999, 28)

As well as renaming vampires “peeps” Westerfeld introduces the idea that animals can also transfer the parasite of vampirism to humans. Just as the fleas infected humans with the plague in the middle centuries, so too can cats infect humans in contemporary society. The cats mean no harm and they do not have to bite people to transmit the parasite. Rather, the cats breathe on those they are close to, thereby causing them to contract the parasite. This shift allows the act of becoming a vampire to move from one of attack to one of affection. The cat does not pick, hunt, and attack their victim but rather yearns to get closer thereby unwittingly spreading the parasite. Beck finds in “today’s vampire lore we are becoming less fearful and hostile, and more curious and sympathetic” (Beck 2011, 92). The infected characters do not hate the cats but learn to understand how the disease was spread. Westerfeld’s novel “explains” the vampire and answers some of the “curious” questions of how and why vampires came into being. Chapter one of Peeps is given the same title as an Elvis Presley movie: “1. STAY AWAY, JOE” (Westerfeld 2005, 1). Not only is this a cultural reference to another popular figure but it also alerts the readers to the connection between the peeps and their past knowledge of culture. One of characteristics of people infected with the parasite is they become afraid of something they once loved. The new peeps cannot stand to hear references to their past lives and interests:

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Chapter Four After a year of hunting, I finally caught up with Sarah. It turned out she’s been hiding in New Jersey, which broke my heart. I mean, Hoboken? Sarah was always head-over-heels in love with Manhattan. For her, New York was like another Elvis, the King remade of bricks, steel, and granite. The rest of the world was a vast extension of her parents’ basement, the last place she wanted to wind up. No wonder she’d had to leave when the disease took hold of her mind. Peeps always run from the things they used to love. (Westerfeld 2005, 1)

The things that Sarah loved the most were not people she knew but icons of popularity: As the disease had settled across her, Sarah had held onto Elvis the longest. After she’d thrown out all her books and clothes, erased every photograph from her hard drive, and broken all the mirrors in her dorm bathroom, the Elvis posters still clung to her walls, crumpled and scratched from bitter blows but hanging on. As her mind transformed, Sarah shouted more than once that she couldn’t stand the sight of me, but she never said a word against the King. (Westerfeld 2005, 15)

Julie Tilsen and David Nyland write “popular and media culture has gained hegemonic status, becoming perhaps the most powerful cultural force shaping cultural identity today” (2009, 4). It is therefore little wonder that the last thing Sarah lets go of is knowledge of her favourite popular icon, as it is her last remaining link with her identity and community. Westerfeld’s novel draws on society’s current interest in forensic science and offers rational explanations for vampires’ existence and the shifts they may have to make to survive in the future. He brings the vampire into the everyday lived contemporary world and offers a plan for peaceful co-existence with humans.

Twilight 2005, New Moon 2006, Eclipse 2007, Breaking Dawn 2008 The Twilight books written by Stephenie Meyer are interesting examples of vampire texts because they reveal how popular knowledge can be viewed through a value lens. The Los Angeles Times called Twilight a “Full blown pop culture phenomenon” (McIntyre 2008, 1). However, this culture phenomenon revealed the tensions of power within popular culture communities. The first novel had quite good reviews when it first came out, but the more popular it became, the harsher the reviews and

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mainstream opinion of the works became. Added to this criticism was the fact that the main readers of these novels were teenage and tween girls. These young girls had the cultural knowledge to understand and interact with these stories, however their agency and legitimacy to have this knowledge was constantly being questioned by the wider community. The “dazzling” vampire was reportedly not a “real” vampire convention and Twilight was being pushed away from the vampire genre. Even though other vampire stories, as has been discussed, changed some vampire conventions, Twilight’s shifts were the ones that were being called into question: Every modern take on the vampire legend sets up new rules that govern the creatures and Twilight is no exception. The Cullens refuse to feed on humans, hunting animals instead, and they are not harmed by the sun, though their luminous white skin does glitter in direct light. It's their selfimposed dietary restrictions and desire to live among people that ultimately helps Bella accept Edward's true nature, but it also puts the vampires in direct conflict with others of their kind, who are less, well, civilized. (McIntyre 2008, 1)

There were cries that the glittering Edward was not hard enough or mean enough to be a vampire. There were even websites for voting that The Count von Count was a better vampire than Edward. The following passage is one of the most criticised passages of the novel: Edward in the sunlight was shocking. I couldn’t get used to it, though I’d been staring at him all afternoon. His skin, white despite the faint flush from yesterday’s hunting trip, literally sparkled, like thousands of tiny diamonds were embedded in the surface. He lay perfectly still in the grass, his shirt open over his sculpted, incandescent chest, his scintillating arms bare. His glistening, pale lavender lids were shut, though of course he didn’t sleep. A perfect statue, carved in some unknown stone, smooth like marble, glittering like crystal. (Meyer 2005, 228)

Earlier I said that in Dracula the Count was described by Jonathan Harker as a statue: Harker says Dracula “stood like a statue, as though his gesture of welcome had fixed him into stone” (Stoker [1987] 1999, 25). It could be seen that Bella’s description is just a furthering of this connection, although in a different context. The character of Blade also had a sculpted chest and perfect body, but he was seen as an action hero and not romantic lead. However, Sonia Levitin says that Edward is “a superhero in his own way - handsome, strong, brave, determined, passionate” (Levitin 2011, 40). This may be so but Edward is still not seen

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in the same way Blade is seen. Levitin finds Edward has “one fatal flaw. Edward is also deadly” (2011, 40). In this regard he should be perceived as dangerous and a figure to be avoided. Edward follows a number of vampire conventions but he is still judged as being too soft to be a “real” vampire. It could be that the convention that is being challenged is not the shifts in the form of the vampire but rather the voice who is describing them. Melissa Rosenberg says So I don’t understand the contempt people who usually have never read the books or seen the movies throw at Twilight. Even if it was the worstwritten, worst –performed movie in the history of the planet, the vitriol with which they attack it is out of balance. I think it’s because Twilight was made for a female audience, and so that must make it silly and frivolous and stupid. (quoted in Valby 2012, 1)

What this reveals is the way the vampire genre becomes a space to enact social tensions. It is not that Twilight was seen as teenage fiction that lowered its cultural value, as other vampire stories such as Peeps, Buffy and Blade all can been seen as teenage or young adult stories. Rather what “devalued” this story was the gender of the audience. Anne Morey says that Far more than Harry Potter, the Twilight Saga speaks overtly to issues of sexuality and female desire, a focus that helps account both for the popularity of Meyer’s series and for the disdain that is excites in certain segments of the reading public. (Morey 2012, 2)

Morey’s comment highlights the way female desire and females taking ownership of popular culture causes much disdain within society. Jonathan Harker tells the story in Dracula while Cal tells his story in Peeps and these are accepted as reliable narrators but Bella’s female point of view is not accepted with as much authority: In my dream it was very dark, and what dim light there was seemed to be radiating from Edward’s skin. I couldn’t see his face, just his back as he walked away from me, leaving me in the blackness. No matter how fast I ran, I couldn’t catch up to him; no matter how loud I called, he never turned. Troubled, I woke in the middle of the night and couldn’t sleep again for what seemed like a very long time. After that, he was in my dreams nearly every night, but always on the periphery, never within reach. (Meyer 2005, 58)

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This passage by Bella is similar in tone and pattern to Harker’s description of his encounter with the three female vampires: I thought at the time I must be dreaming when I saw them, for, though the moonlight was behind them they threw no shadow on the floor. They came close to me, and looked at me for some time and then whispered together. Two were dark, and had high aquiline noses, like the Count’s, and great dark piercing eyes that seemed to be almost red when contrasted with the pale yellow moon. The other was fair, as fair as can be, with great, wavy masses of golden hair and eyes like pale sapphires. I seemed somehow to know her face, and to know it in connection with some dreamy fear, but I could not recollect at the moment how or where. (Stoker [1987] 1999, 51)

While Harker’s interpretation is read as reliable, Bella’s voice is questioned and she is seen as lacking any authority or agency. The female point of view is often used in the romance genre and it is this association that causes tension: “Whether genre or fan activity is the yardstick, a young and feminized consumer is still at the bottom of the pile” (Morey 2012, 9). The Romance genre has a low status in the genre hierarchy. However, as Helen T. Bailie reminds us, according to statistics brought out by Romance Writers of America, in 2009, the paranormal subgenre made up 17.16% of the popular romance genre, which in itself comprised 54% of all books sold by the publishing industry. (Bailie 2011, 141)

Nina Auerbach’s previous point about the horror genre being the most male of all genres is worth raising again: “the most sophisticated and bestknown experts on American popular horror insist that it is and always has been a boy’s game” (1995, 3). However, females do not accept this limitation and nor, does it appear, do the facts. Badley says that “the majority of readers of horror fiction are women in their thirties and forties” (Badley 1996, 5). The popularity of Twilight proves that females of all ages have a lot to say about popular culture and also have a lot of cultural knowledge. They took ownership of the vampire “lore” and this created tension: giving the film a generic foothold in romance (and thus, arguably, lowering its status), the Twilight saga threatens to direct the phallic potency of the vampire not toward the world domination coveted by Dracula or toward what Linda Badley terms the “existential nausea” of Anne Rice’s Louis, but rather toward living happily ever after with a teenage girl who is

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ultimately identified as the most powerful member of the couple. That this outcome strikes so many observers as a degeneration from a once-proud (and patriarchal) tradition is clearly, at least from a feminist point of view, a political point worthy of comment. (Morey 2012, 2)

While a lot is made of how Meyer changes the vampire into a “weaker” version of the form, very little research has examined the actual structures of the works. Although Meyer has always maintained she had never read the novel, Twilight is actually more similar to Dracula in form and structure than many of the other vampire stories that are accepted as “real” vampire stories. At the beginning of this chapter, I implied that there has never been one representation of the vampire and from its literary beginnings the vampire has blurred contrasting images. Twilight is a blurring between Polidori’s Byronic vampire figure and Stoker’s novel. Twilight does not so much follow Stoker’s novel in the image of the vampire but more in the structure of the story. If a comparison between the opening scenes of both novels is undertaken it becomes clear that Twilight follows Dracula quite closely. In the first few pages there are a number of similarities: Dracula: Jonathan Harker’s Journal (kept in shorthand) 3 May, Bistritz-Left Munich at 8.35p.m. on the 1st May, arriving at Vienna early next morning; should have arrived at 6.46, but train was an hour late. Buda-Pesth seems a wonderful place, from the glimpse which I got of it from the train and the little I could walk through the streets. I feared to go very far from the station, as we had arrived late and would start as near the correct time as possible. The impression I had was that we were leaving the West and entering the East; the most Western of splendid bridges over the Danube, which is here of noble width and depth, took us among the traditions of Turkish rule. (Stoker [1987] 1999, 9)

Twilight: My mother drove me to the airport with the windows rolled down. It was seventy-five degrees in Phoenix, the sky a perfect, cloudless blue. I was wearing my favorite shirt—sleeveless, white eyelet lace; I was wearing it as a farewell gesture. My carry-on item was a parka. In the Olympic Peninsula of northwest Washington State, a small town named Forks exists under a near-constant cover of clouds. It rains on this inconsequential town more than any other place in the United States of

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America. It was from this town and its gloomy, omnipresent shade that my mother escaped with me when I was only a few months old. (Meyer 2005, 3)

Both these novels begin with a leaving of what is known and entering into the unknown. They begin as travel narratives and both destinations are not of the character’s choosing. Harker is travelling because of work commitments while Bella is travelling to leave her mother and live with her father. Even before the reader gets to read these first chapters there is a preface in each of these novels. The preface in Twilight begins: “I’D NEVER GIVEN MUCH THOUGHT TO HOW I WOULD DIE—though I’d had reason enough in the last few months—but even if I had, I would not have imagined it like this (Meyer 2005, 1).

The preface in Dracula begins “How these papers have been placed in sequence will be made clear in the reading of them” (Stoker [1987] 1999, 8). I would suggest it is not the form of Edward that causes tension or the actual narrative structure of the stories but rather it is the blending of the vampire with the Romance genre that is the most problematic. Romance fiction is the least valued by society: Because Meyer is working with a combination of low-status genres—the vampire tale, the romance, the female coming-of-age story—the political aspects of the saga’s genre are both prominent and inextricable from gender. Detractors accuse Meyer of misunderstanding genre, lacking command of the conventions specifically of the vampire tale, historically the most male-oriented of the genres upon which she draws. (Morey 2012, 2)

According to James Twitchell, in order for a myth to endure it must “do more than inform or validate some social order; it must suggest specific behaviour that maintains both the social order and bolsters the individual’s sense of worth” (Twitchell quoted in Wilson 2011, 17). It therefore appears that the bolstering of female worth is not always valued. Buffy and Twilight both present vampire as boyfriend. This concept may cause unease because traditionally male heroes rescued the females from the clutches of the vampire creatures. If the females are now choosing the vampires as boyfriends and husbands, the vampires are no longer monsters who must be killed, but rivals for female affection and

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love. The male human has to share its power and position and no longer has an identifiable “other” to destroy.

True Blood 2008 until present True Blood is the HBO television series based on Charlaine Harris’s thirteen Southern Vampire Mysteries novels. The television series created and produced by Alan Ball (director of Six Feet Under and American Beauty) is set in Bon Temps, a small town in Northwestern Louisiana and it premiered in 2008. The show revolves around the premise that the invention of synthetic blood (Tru Blood) has allowed vampires to live among humans. There are mainstream vampires who want to integrate into society and others who resist. At the same time there are humans who do not trust the vampires and do not want them living in the community. Daniel Kimmel says “bigotry by humans toward vampires, even the good ones who drink Tru Blood instead of draining their mortal neighbours,” is a clear theme of the show (Kimmel quoted in Wilson 2010, 4): True Blood offers a fresh spin on the vampire genre that opens a rich vein of new philosophical queries. In the world envisioned by Ball and Harris, those conundrums-on-legs we call vampires have come out of the coffin and are attempting to live openly alongside human beings. (Irwin 2011, 16)

The three main characters in the series are Sookie Stackhouse, a telepathic human, Bill Compton, born in 1835 and turned into a vampire in 1865, and Eric Northman, born in 900AD and turned into a vampire in 930AD. Sookie is attracted to Bill initially because she cannot read or more specifically hear his mind and this attracts her to him. She believes she can be at peace when she is with him. Bill lived through the American Civil War and he has the character traits of a Southern gentleman. Eric, a former Viking, is now the sheriff of the area and owner of the vampire bar “Fangtasia”. This series calls on the tradition of the Southern Gothic and the dark memories of slavery to set the mood and atmosphere. The deep-south is the setting for True Blood: Let those other vampires sparkle in the American northwest; the South, and especially rural Louisiana, is the perfect place to tell a story about vampires’ integration into our society. (Rogers in Wilson 2010, 45)

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There is a haunting that hangs over the entire show and this in part stems from its setting. The abject or excess of society appears to have all merged in this one small town: “The genre of the Southern Gothic shares many similarities with the tropes inherent in European Gothic, especially those hallmarks of the Gothic which include a pushing toward extremes and excess” (Amador quoted in Mulch 2013, 165). This series is filled with excess in all shapes and forms. The opening credits for the show set the dark undertones. The opening images are “disturbing because they have been given new context: either how the image has been edited into a sequence or the appearance of the film itself” (Kimmel quoted in Wilson 2011, 5). The images in the credits cause unease because they are “real”. They are not images of past vampire stories but images from human and natural history in some of its darkest moments: slavery, Ku Klux Klan, a body decomposing, maggots and falling onto all of these images are small drops of blood. These dark images are mingled with images of people’s houses, people having sex in bars, alligators in the swamp, churches, steeples and sunsets. The opening credits are designed by Digital Kitchen and when asked about their design Matt Mulder and Rama Allen said they had tried to move past cliché representations of vampires and concentrated their images on predators, supernatural forces, and parasites. They said Alan Ball had directed them to produce a “pulpy romp” (Forget the Film Watch the Titles 2009). This romp is one that brings human darkness into the vampire genre. The theme song is Bad Things by Jace Everett. Some of the lyrics include “I don’t know who you think you are/ But before this night is through/ I want to do bad things with you” (Everett 2006). It is unclear who will be doing the bad things: the vampire to the human or the human to the vampire. However, even though the unease is one grounded in reality it is a reality that is far enough removed for the viewers to believe that these things may be happening today. Paula Rogers says “there’s no established pop-culture frame of reference for what goes on in a place like Bon Temps, beyond the usual small-town storyline” (quoted in Wilson 2010, 49). This creates more unease because if the town was one that people knew or lived everyday they would question whether such things could happen. However, the audience is more likely to be seduced by using a small town that is believable but not totally knowable: It is the cumulative power of the real and the ambiguous and unknown that takes us from our living rooms and into the world of True Blood. (Kimmel in Wilson 2010, 17)

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While Twilight and Peeps both contain characters who abstain from sex, True Blood embraces sexuality in all shapes and forms. William Irwin calls True Blood a “sexually charged HBO series” (Irwin 2011, 15). In many scenes there is a concentration on bodily fluids, on making these fluids, on draining these fluids, on sucking these fluids, and on licking these fluids. Sucking, biting, licking, kissing, and swallowing fluids are all participated in during sexual acts. It is almost cliché to say that vampires desire and need blood, but the vampires in True Blood take this desire further. It is not only blood that is desired but all fluids. This desire may stem from the vampire’s knowledge that they can be turned to dust and disappear at any moment. The vampires in True Blood cannot get enough fluid into their body. Rachel Robinson finds that “it may be that it is not the blood itself, but the performance of a particular action that has the power—the action of drinking” (quoted in Wilson 2011, 256). Robinson is referring to how the vampires in True Blood consume synthetic blood rather than human blood. Her point raises the idea that it is the performance of drinking fluid that takes on a ritualistic element. In religious symbolism, the act of drinking wine connects believers with the blood of Christ. The act of drinking fluids connects the vampires with humanity. The more fluid the vampires can consume the closer to being human they feel. At the same time there are humans who want to collect and sell vampire blood, known as “V” because it acts like a drug. Bailie finds that the taking of blood or blood exchange between protagonists “become the very elements that enhance, consolidate, and secure the couple’s romantic relationship” (Bailie 2011, 142). This is very much the case in True Blood. Sookie drinks some of Bill’s blood and after this she has an even stronger connection with him. Bill can feel Sookie’s presence and their bond with each other becomes unbreakable. Once again it is the sharing or taking of fluids that makes the vampire appear more human. The series raises and discusses many of the themes that were raised in Buffy but it does so in a darker, more adult manner. The humans and the vampires struggle daily with their desires. They also give in to these desires with differing outcomes. This series also places far more importance on place and setting and the connection between human darkness and vampire characteristics.

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Conclusion As has been discussed, the vampire has had a long and diverse fictional history. Its form can embody the dominant viewpoint or take up the form of the excess or abject of society. In Blade, the vampire and vampire hunter merged, creating a strong, extremely masculine, ultra hip, and contemporary action figure. In Buffy, a young female emerges as the “chosen one” and battles with demons with strength and determination. She also falls in love with a vampire and struggles with the outcomes of this choice. Peeps renames the vampire and brings in forensic science to explain the parasite that causes the disease. Twilight takes the vampire into the realm of romance and family. It introduces a dazzling vampire who protects and falls in love and marries. True Blood takes its vampires, who are sexually charged and erotic creatures, into the South and there they live and engage with humans. In all of these representations, the vampire adapts and accepts their new form and new role. If nothing else, vampires are creatures of adaptation. It is ironic that a creature that has no reflection or shadow of their own is the creature who ultimately reflects the conflicting identity tensions within society. The vampire casts no shadow and has no individual reflection but somehow manages to become a collective, but at the same time plural, reflection of society. It also manages to retain conventions of each past incarnation. Rogers says “vampires are walking time capsules” (Rogers quoted in Wilson 2010, 49). They are eyewitnesses to past beliefs and can not only inform us of the past, but they bring the past into the present where it can be challenged. It is this dual concept of the fusing of past and present that can cause unease and friction. The vampire as a fictional figure has continued to re-emerge and re-enter society’s stories and imaginings. It shifts and changes but whatever form it takes it remains engrained in the imaginings of each society. So while it appears that there will always be tensions within society around “what” form the vampire should take the vampire itself does not care—the vampire has seen many trends come and go and it appears to have the ability to prosper and grow in whatever form it is “allowed” to occupy.

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Works Cited Angel. Directed by Greenwatt, David and Joss Whedon (1996–2003; Los Angeles, CA: 20th Television, 2001). DVD. Auerbach, Nina. 1995. Our Vampires, Ourselves. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Badley, Linda. 1996. Writing Horror and the Body: The Fiction of Stephen King, Clive Barker and Anne Rice. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Bailie, Helen, T. 2011. “Blood Ties: The Vampire Lover in the Popular Romance.” Journal of American Culture 34.2: 141-148. Beck, Bernard. 2011. “Fearless Vampires: Bloodsuckers We Love in Twilight, True Blood and others.” Multicultural Perspectives 13.2: 9092. Blade, directed by Stephen Norrington (1998; Los Angeles, CA: New Line Cinema), DVD. Blade 11, directed by Guillermo del Toro (2002; Los Angeles, CA: New Line Cinema), DVD. Blade Trinity, directed by David. S Goyer (2004; Los Angeles, CA: New Line Cinema), DVD. Boyd, A. 2006. “Gustav Meyrink and the Evolution of the Literary Vampire: From Feared Bloodsucker to Esoteric Phenomenon.” Neophilologus 90.4: 601-620. Brooks, Max. 2003. The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Undead. New York: Three Rivers Press. Buffy: The Vampire Slayer. Directed by Joss Whedon. (1996-2003; Los Angeles, CA: 20th Television, 2001), DVD. De Marco, Joseph. 2007. “Vampire Literature: Something Young Adults can Really Sink Their Teeth Into.” Emergency Literature 24. 5: 26-28. Everett, Jace. 2006. “Bad Things.” Epic Records, JVRT001. Fiske, John. 2010. Understanding Popular Culture. Hoboken: Taylor and Francis. Forget the Film, Watch the Titles. 2009. “True Blood Title Sequence.” Accessed March 10th, 2013. http://www.watchthetitles.com/articles/00131-true_blood. Frayling: Christopher. 1992. Vampyres: Lord Byron to Count Dracula. London: Faber & Faber. Frost, Brian, J. 1989. The Monster with a Thousand Faces: Guises of the Vampire in Myth and Literature. Ohio: Bowling Green State University Press. Gelder, Ken. 1994. Reading the Vampire. London: Routledge. Gelder, Ken, ed. 2000. The Horror Reader. London: Routledge.

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Greene, Richard and Mohammad K. Silem. 2010. Zombies, Vampires, and Philisophy: New Life for the Undead. New York: Open Court. Holston, Noel. 2003. “Fangs for the Memories: Cult Favourite Buffy the Vampire Slayer takes its Last Bite Tonight.” South Florida Sun Sentinel, 20 May. Irwin, William. 2011. True Blood and Philosophy. New York: Wiley. Kane, Tim. 2006. The Changing Vampire of Film and Television: A Critical Study of the Growth of a Genre. Jefferson: McFarland. Levine, Elana, Lisa Ann Parks, Mary Celeste Kearney, and Susan Murray. 2007. Undead TV: Essays on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. North Caroline: Duke University Press. Levitin, Sonia. 2011. “Why Vampires.” The Horn Book Magazine 87.5: 40-41. Lusted, Marcia Amidon. 2010. “Vampires, Winners of the Monster Popularity Contest.” Faces. 27.2: 16-19. http://search.proquest.com.ezp01.library.qut.edu.au/docview/758610036. Marion, Isaac. 2010. Warm Bodies. Simon & Schuster. McIntyre, Gina. 2008. “Jugular? No, Jocular”. Los Angeles Times, November 2. Accessed 4th May, 2013. http://articles.latimes.com/2008/nov/02/entertainment/ca-twilight2. McLeod, Judith. 2010. Vampires: A Bite-Sized History. Chicago: Murdoch Books. Mercer, Joyce Ann. 2011. “Vampires, Desire, Girls and God: Twilight and the Spiritualities of Adolescent Girls.” Pastoral Psychology 60.2: 263278. Meyer, Stephenie. 2005. Twilight. London: Atom. —. 2006. New Moon. London: Atom —. 2007. Eclipse. London: Atom. —. 2008. Breaking Dawn. London: Atom. Miller, Ann and John Mitchenson. 2012. “QI: Quite Interesting Facts About Vampires.” The Telegraph, June 5. Accessed March, 21st, 2013. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/qi/9312067/QI-Quite-interestingfacts-about-vampires.html. Morey, Anne. 2012. Genre, Reception, and Adaptation in the “Twilight” Series. Farnham: Ashgate. Mutch, Deborah, ed.. 2013. The Modern Vampire and Human Identity. Houndsmill: Palgrave Macmillan. Niland, Lauren. 2012. “Original Review of Dracula.” The Guardian, April 20. Accessed October 10th, 2012. Polidori, John William. (1819) 2009. The Vampyre: A Tale. Reprint, Auckland: The Floating Press.

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Prince, Stephen. 2004. The Horror Film. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Rickels, Laurence, A. 1999. The Vampire Lectures. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ross, Sharon. 2004. “Dangerous Demons: Fan Responses to Girls’ Power, Girls’ Bodies, Girls’ Beauty in Buffy The Vampire Slayer. 5,2: 82-100. Rymer, James Malcolm. (1847) 2012. Varney the Vampire. Reprint, Auckland: The Floating Press. Smith, Tara. 2013. “Interview with “Warm Bodies” author Isaac Marion.”Aetiology, March 7th , Accessed April 20th, 2013. http://scienceblogs.com/aetiology/2013/03/07/interview-with-warmbodies-author-isaac-marion/. Stoker, Bram. (1897) 1999. Dracula. Reprint, London: Claremont Classics. Swanson, Tim. 2012. “Lost Boys Never Grow Old: Twihards take note: the original teen vampire movie still has style and sex appeal.” Orlando Sentinel, 26th August. Tilsen, Julie and David Nyland. 2009. “Popular Culture Texts and Young People: Making Meaning, Honouring Resistance and Becoming Harry Potter.” International Journal of Narrative Therapy and Community Work 2009.2: 3-10. True Blood: The Complete First Season. Directed by Alan Ball. (2008;Home Box Office, United States), DVD. Warm Bodies, directed by Jonathan Levine (2013; Los Angeles, CA; Summit Entertainment), DVD. Westerfield, Scott. 2005. Peeps. Camberwell, Victoria: Penguin. —. 2013. “Peeps.” Accessed May 15th, 2013. http://scottwesterfeld.com/books/peeps/. Weinstock, Jeffrey. 2012. The Vampire Film: Undead Cinema. London: Wallflower Press. Williamson, Milly. 2005. The Lure of the Vampire: Gender, Fiction and Fandom from Bram Stoker to Buffy. London: Wallflower Press. Wilson, Leah, ed. 2010. A Taste of true Blood: The Fangbanger’s Guide. Dallas: Benbella. Wilson, Natalie. 2011. Seduced by Twilight: The Allure and Contradictory Messages of the Popular Saga. Jefferson: McFarland & Company.

CHAPTER FIVE GRAPHICALLY POLITICAL: EXPLORING SOCIAL ISSUES IN THE GRAPHIC NOVEL VIVIENNE MULLER

The graphic novel is something of a broad church and has emerged in the last few decades as an artistic form popular with a visually literate youth culture. While various forms of graphic literature and comics have been in existence for many centuries in many cultures (Kunzle 1974), the graphic novel is a specifically contemporary descriptor, first used on the cover of Will Eisner’s 1978 paperback collection of illustrated short stories, A Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories, to identify the visual mode and the extended narrative arc of this genre whether the latter is wordless or not. While these two aspects are fundamental, there is no limit to the aesthetic modes in which they are delivered. Weiner (2003) and others point out the impressive variety of graphic novels in contemporary times. These include incarnations of the old comic book superhero stories such as the Phantom and Superman to more recent iterations such as X-Men (Joss Whedon) and Watchmen (Alan Moore); graphically rendered classical texts such as Nikki Greenburg’s whimsical versions of The Great Gatsby and Hamlet; Japanese manga enjoying translation into English and other languages; and adaptations of popular written texts for young readers such as Neil Gaiman and P. Craig Russel’s graphic version of Gaiman’s novella Coraline. In addition to issues around definition and relevance are those related to the aesthetics of the form itself which increasingly invite a particular way of reading (Eisner 1985; McCloud 1993: Wolk 2007). In Comics and Sequential Art, Eisner refers to the reader of the graphic novel having to exercise “visual and verbal interpretive skills” in order to understand the “grammar” of sequential art. In this approach, the “regimens of art” involving stylistic aspects such as “perspective, symmetry, brushstroke” are simultaneously read with “the regimens of literature” such as “grammar, plot and syntax” (Eisner 1985,

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8). This dualistic reading approach resonates with the multi-tasking across platforms and domains required of young people in the modern word. As Carter contends: “The graphic novel presents a unique ‘multiliterac’ experience interfacing multiple sites of literate practices” (Carter 2007, 1). In recent times, graphic novels have also gained considerable traction in high school classrooms. Teachers recognise them as valuable resources feeding a wide range of disciplines, as instructive modalities for honing visual and verbal literacy skills, and as transitional readers between early childhood picture books and later literary texts. Increasingly however, graphic texts are being regarded in both academic and community contexts as another important and legitimate cultural site around which artistic practices and learning experiences coalesce and multiply (Carter 2007; Chute, 2008a, 2008b, 2011; Mallia 2007; Hammond 2009, 2012; Monnin 2010; Tabachnick 2009; Cary 2004; Wiener 2003; Park 2011). The graphic novel has also demonstrated its credentials as an aesthetic form capable of representing and challenging repressive political and cultural ideologies and of engaging with confronting social issues. Enza Gandolfo observes that fiction that is considered political is often devalued due in large part to myths about creativity being “irrational”, “spontaneous” and “spiritual” and thus a natural enemy of things political or ideological (Gandolfo 2006, n.p.). However, many graphic novels inhabit this artistic/ethical/political space leading David Kunzle and other critics of the genre to claim that the graphic novel “has now become a major vehicle of social and political protest” in much the same way as other visual arts forms such as painting, murals, photography and poster art have been exercised for these purposes (Kunzle 1999, n.p.). The visual modality of the graphic narrative facilitates a ready imagining of historical, political or social issues, which, for younger readers, can often be challenging, even disturbing. Hillary Chute argues that the graphic novel can “perform the enabling political and aesthetic work of bearing witness powerfully because of its rich narrative texture; its flexible page architecture; its sometimes consonant, sometimes dissonant visual and verbal narratives; and its structural threading of absence and presence” (Chute 2008b, 93-94). Chute and others also insist that the reader has to work hard in the interpretive process to participate in the demands that the visual layout of the narrative is requesting, especially with regard to confronting subject matter. In her book on teaching the graphic novel to young people, Kate Monnin points to the importance of encouraging a critical reading of graphic novels that calls for engagement with issues of power, identity and culture. As a teacher, she exhorts her students to “read with an eye toward different cultural backgrounds and experiences, paying

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particular attention to issues of diversity in the text, and how the elements of style highlight or shun these issues” (Monnin 2010, 55). Many graphic novels present themselves as very consciously directed aesthetic interventions into traumatic times and/or social spaces in which issues of power, cultural differences and diversity are central drivers of the narrative and thematic action. Eisner’s highly regarded A Contract with God and Other Stories (1978) is a progenitor of this type of narrative. The four stories that comprise his text, expressed from the perspectives of individual Jewish families living at 55 Dropsie Avenue in a Bronx tenement in the 1930s, are visually interrelated in a cyclical manner that, as Derek Royal argues, accentuates their weighty socio-cultural themes: Indeed, the hybrid nature of A Contract with God – its fragmented storylike structure balanced against its more novelistic cohesiveness – is an apt form for a kind of ethnic writing that struggles with questions of assimilation and identity. As an in-between text – not a long-form narrative and not a mere collection of stories; neither purely text-based nor solely image-driven – Eisner's graphic cycle underscores the ambivalence felt by many ethnic American (in this case, first- and second-generation Jewish Americans). (Royal 2011, 153)

Eisner’s approach in this and his other works constitutes a casting of history from below; that is, it annexes a narrative space for the representation of individuals caught in the larger moments of history and social change. Increasingly, historiography and social commentators heed this approach because it focuses on the ways in which memoirs, personal stories and diaries from disenfranchised and/or marginalised groups can deliver another register of meaning that counters, amplifies and dialogues with the “official” histories of place and perspective. Art Spiegelman’s popular Pulitzer prize-winning Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (1986) is held as an iconic example of the socio-political graphic novel in which the subaltern speaks and visually articulates understandings and experiences of a specifically horrific period of history (Park, 2011). A graphic memoir based on personal accounts of Spiegelman’s father’s survival of the Auschwitz concentration camp, Maus has spawned considerable academic interest in the genre’s capacity to address important social issues of our times. While not intentionally directed at a younger reader, the allegorical form in which Spiegelman elects to address “trauma, (post) memory, (post) history, generational transmission, and the ethics of representation” amongst other themes (Park 2011, 148) is a tactic that conveys troublesome knowledge in a more palatable way without forfeiting the seriousness of subject matter. In a bibliographic survey of Maus criticism,

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Hye Su Park refers to Andrea Liss’ interest in Spiegelman’s use of animals to represent Nazis, Poles and Jews which makes the point that “Spiegelman’s approach to the Holocaust, in comic form and with animal imagery, transforms the historical specificity into artistic/fictional representation of the Shoah, consequently making the official history more accessible to the public” (Park 2011, 160). Henry Yoshitaka Kiyama’s The Four Immigrants Manga: A Japanese Experience in San Francisco 1904– 1924 (1999) is another timely example of this type of intervention in its recreation of the lives of four Japanese immigrants to the United States in the early part of the twentieth century and their disillusionment with the promises of the American dream of success and fairness to all. Kiyama’s autobiographically-informed focus on the lives of his four young Japanese characters provides an insightful perspective from below on the “culture and (racist) attitudes” of a specific period in the history of American immigration and settlement (Chapman 1999, n.p.). Boatright likewise comments that Kiyama’s graphic depictions deliver an accessible poignancy and realism to the experiences of discrimination: Kiyama’s work represents a palpable contribution towards understanding an immigrant experience relevant to today’s readers through the medium of the graphic novel. (Boatright 2010, 471)

This chapter focuses on a number of contemporary graphic novels/narratives that contribute to the political work that can be usefully performed by the genre at the instructive and aesthetic level. They are texts in which personal and socio-cultural identity and related issues of power and cultural inequality are spatially registered through the stories of young people caught up in wider social and historical contexts and events. Such narratives call attention through their “rich narrative textures” to restrictive and punitive ideologies and social systems (some subtle, others more overt) as they impact upon the lives of ordinary individuals. In this collision between the margin and the centre, the self and other, the individual and the system, issues of belonging, identity, alienation, and “home” versus “away/exile” are of central significance. In all four texts, the protagonists, from a variety of cultural contexts, embark on emotional and physical journeys often forced on them by social and political circumstances not of their own making. For the most part the focalisation in these texts is from the perspectives of the most marginalised in society—children, adolescents and migrants/refugees—with whom young adult readers are clearly invited to identify. Gene Luen Yang’s full colour, comic style narrative, American Born Chinese (first published in 2006), Marjane Satrapi’s stark black and white memoirs, Persepolis (2003) and

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Persepolis 2 (2004), Shaun Tan’s wordless picto-grammatical The Arrival (2006), and the collaborative Stanford student project Shake Girl (2008) are selected for consideration in this chapter to demonstrate the flexibility of the graphic novel as a compelling narrative vehicle for carrying social and political issues from the perspective of those whose stories form a type of historical record from below.

American Born Chinese – Gene Luen Yang The multi-layered thematic and visual textures of award winning American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang (2006) provide a humorous account of the socially sensitive issues of cultural identity, exclusion and belonging, from the perspective of a second generation American-born Chinese boy. This graphic novel establishes resonating conversations around these issues through the three narratives arcs it artfully juggles: the story of the Monkey King, a comically re-worked mythopoeic tale with a strong moral core; and the two “realistic” tales of Jin Wang, the only Chinese-American boy at a new school, and Danny, an all-American adolescent and his uncomfortable relationship with his Chinese cousin, the irrepressible Chin-Kee. In his discussion of the usefulness of the social issues-based graphic novel in the classroom, Michael Boatright notes that American Born Chinese “gestures towards a problematic and complex reality for second-generation immigrants in the United States living in two often contradictory cultural worlds” (Boatright 2010, 474). Yang’s dialogic structuring of the three stories emphasises this complexity. They thematically and graphically echo each other, adding density to the oppositional viewpoints and values around which they circle, and they are synthesised cleverly in the concluding frames, providing a form of reconciliation and affirmation. Yang’s text operates in a disruptive postmodern way in its use of parody and stereotype, mimicry and performativity. It exposes what Taussig in Mimesis and Alterity (1993), and Susan Friedman in “‘Border Talk’, Hybridity and Performativity” (2002) call cultural and intercultural mimesis—that is the “the powerful drive to imitate” at the “borders between different cultures” that “leads one group to mime aspects of the other, thus to repeat in a kind of performance what one group sees the other doing” (Friedman 2002, 6). American Born Chinese enacts this cultural mimesis through the attempts by the three protagonists in the three story skeins to fit in with another culture and/or to differentiate the self from it. In this process, “structures of domination” and subordination are exposed and critiqued (Friedman 2002, 6).

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Jin Wang is an American-born Chinese boy, but his sense of belonging is disrupted when his family move from Chinatown to another part of San Francisco and he has to attend a school in which there is one Japanese girl but no other Chinese-American children. The narrative tracks his attempts to fit in and is relayed visually from his perspective and via verbal voice over and speech bubbles. At Mayflower Elementary school he is managed ineptly on his first day at the new school by his teacher Mrs Greeder. In introducing him to the class, she mispronounces his name (“Jing Jang”), erroneously announces he has just come from China, and reassures another student, Timmy, who claims that his mother told him Chinese people eat dogs, that “I’m sure Jin doesn’t do that! In fact Jin’s family probably stopped that sort of thing as soon as they came to the United States” (Yang 2008, 31). The positioning of Jin, the teacher, the class, the US and Timmy in the sequence of panels that depict this situation amplifies the power hierarchy and the symbolic order that defines Jin’s identity as outsider, “alien”, and of lower status. He is shown as barely peeking above the borders of the panels while the others loom large in them. While he tries to correct the information the teacher provides the class (his name is Jin Wang, he is from San Francisco), his speech bubble is overwhelmed by the teacher’s and he is physically dwarfed by her more ample build. While these depictions tend to suggest the powerlessness of Jin, they also invite the reader, through comically cartoonish and parodic representations of the more powerful figures, to engage with the subversive register at which the text operates. Timmy appears as an uninformed dupe of the cultural stereotyping of the “other”, while the teacher is an overly madeup, motherly individual who means well, despite her cultural ignorance. In the second narrative layer of this text, the story of the all-American boy, Danny, Yang draws on an older stereotype of the Chinese figure in the form of the buck-toothed, aptly named, Chin-Kee, Danny’s cousin. Chin-Kee comes to visit Danny and family, vowing to find a “pletty Amellican Girl for himself”, who can “bind “her feet and “bear ChinKee’s children” (Yang 2008, 50-51). Chin-Kee wears the clothes of his Chinese forbears, sports a plait and a cap, eats “clispy, flied Cat gizzards wiff noodles” (s) and speaks English with a decidedly stereotypical linguistic intonation—his ‘r’s become ‘l’s. Yang has considerable fun with this configuration, using it to puncture Danny’s comfortable, established world of sport, girls, jocks and good times—another stereotype that is satirically exaggerated in this tale. As a subaltern figure within the potentially alienating context of white middle-class America, Chin-Kee is depicted as confident and at home, disarmingly ignorant of the prejudice around him, and a source of discomfort to the established masculine

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hegemony of the society. Frank and funny, clever and witty, Chin-Kee proves hugely successful in the eyes of the authority figures when he visits Danny’s school, revealing his superiority in History, Government, Biology, and Spanish subjects. While an embarrassment to Danny, he is lauded by the teachers as a knowledgeable and attentive student, one teacher remarking to his class: “You know people; it would behoove you all to be a little more like Chin-kee” (Yang 2008, 111). Chin-kee speaks English but in amplifying his Chinese accent and indeed in “performing” both his own stereotype and mimicking that of the good white student, he articulates an in-between space that opens up a critique of dominant and other. By the end of Chin-Kee’s visit, Danny has lost a potential girlfriend (she begins to detect Danny might be developing buck teeth), loses his credibility as a sports jock and is reduced to being known as Chin-Kee’s cousin. This story reverses Jin Wang’s story in terms of relations of power and ideas about belonging and alienation, but it also complicates them. While Chin-Kee is an alien in Danny’s world, he possesses the cultural capital to momentarily belong to and succeed in it, even chaotically disrupting it when he “pee-pees” in the can of coke belonging to Danny’s unlikable friend Steve. However despite his derring-do, his superior knowledge and his eternal optimism, the narrative makes it clear, through Danny’s peers’ reactions to him, that Chin-Kee is still, like Jin Wang in the first story, an outsider. Danny himself is made to feel progressively alienated from his comfortable life through Chin-Kee’s behaviour and mannerisms, and does his best to dissociate himself from his cousin. As in Jin’s story, Yang leverages this dislocation and dissociation to critique the ways in which adhering to culturally held beliefs about others can be damaging to all parties. Chin-Kee exposes the shallowness of Danny’s peers and the narrowness of their understanding of others, but this is also revealed as a convenient cultural myth that Danny desperately clings to in his efforts to sustain his sense of belonging, to be “at home” in his own culture. Yang also makes us aware throughout Jin’s and Danny’s stories that views expressed by the dominant group not only create an alien “other”, but can also be appropriated (imitated) by the other as a marker of how to behave if one wishes to belong to the more powerful group. This happens in Jin Wang’s story. Jin yearns to fit in, to be a popular, all-American boy at his new school, and in so doing, allows himself to be mistreated by a bully boy named Peter who plays racist and violent games with him. When a young Taiwanese boy, Wei-Chen Sun, joins the class two years after Jin’s arrival, the scene of his introduction is almost a replica of Jin’s earlier induction. This time however it is Jin who initially rejects Wei-

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Chen secretly admitting that “something made me want to beat him up” and later admonishing him by telling him to speak English because he is in America. In a short time however, and in the absence of the more dubious and fickle friends Jin has made at the school, he and Wei-Chen become good friends. The message here signals the difficulty of crossing into another cultural space as Wei-Chen and Jin find alliance through their mutual marginalisation. Moreover, the cultural mimesis that Jin performs in trying to belong to the dominant culture reveals the latter to be based on questionable values unworthy of emulating. The turning point in Jin and Wei-Chen’s relationship is a transformer robot that Wei-Chen’s father gives him as a farewell present before the family leaves for America. The transformer and the idea of transformation and doubling are important motifs in the novel with respect to the themes of alienation, belonging, cultural hybridity and mimicry, and are central to the three narratives in the text. Jin’s favourite toy is the transformer and in his former home in Chinatown, he and his friends watch transformer cartoons and play regularly with their transformer toys. The panel that depicts this features four young boys happily engaged in “epic battles that left our toys smelling like spit” (Yang 26). In their capacity to morph from utilitarian and everyday things such as boats and trucks and planes into powerful deities and monsters, transformers validate the possibility of overcoming adverse and crushing circumstances, so it is not surprising that the very young Jin wants to become a transformer when he grows up. However, an old Chinese woman herbalist warns him that “it is easy to become anything you wish…so long as you’re willing to forfeit your soul” (Yang 2008, 29). Yang uses the transformer motif and the presaging comments of the old woman in the three narrative arcs, raising questions about transformations of the self in order to satisfy the “other” as we witness in Jin’s forced rejection of his Chinese background and desire to be American; Danny’s racist rejection of his Chinese cousin, and the Monkey King’s desire to be the most powerful deity in the third narrative skein of the text. The Story of the Monkey-King, a famous one in Chinese folk-loric, is the opening tale of American Born Chinese. It frames, through its allegorical forms, the moral and cultural dimensions of the two “realistic” stories of Jin and Danny that follow it. The Monkey-King tale is a mythical piece about a powerful magical monkey king who yearns to take his place as one of the heavenly deities. Yang’s tale respects the spirit of the original and uses it for his modern-day story of cultural disenfranchisement and cultural mimesis. In American Born Chinese, The

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Monkey-King has become the king of Flower-fruit Mountain after ridding it of the tiger-spirit and has devoted himself to mastering, through the Arts of Kung-Fu, “the four major heavenly disciplines, prerequisites for immortality” (Yang 2008, 10). He is apparently content with his lot as a benign ruler of his monkey kingdom, but his aspiration for higher deity leads him beyond the borders of his known world. Excited at the prospect of being accepted into their midst, as one of them, he attends a party of the immortals, only to be stopped at the door and turned back on the pretext that he has no shoes. The real reason is that, while he may be a king and while he may have even done enough to become a deity, he is, as the guard informs him, “still a monkey” (Yang 2008, 15). The Monkey-King’s reaction is to attack the party revellers using his Kung-Fu skills, gaining short term satisfaction over his potential equals, now adversaries. He returns to his tribe, now overly conscious of his monkey smell, his sense of self truncated by the view of others. A short time later, transformed by this experience, Monkey-King reasserts his authority over his tribe, makes them wear shoes, becomes a more powerful and less democratic king and transforms himself into a much larger monkey with super powers. He effectively denies his original identity and becomes the most powerful of the deities, destroying most of the other gods through the exercise of his transformative skills. Yang’s use of large splash panels and sound effects underscore Monkey-King’s vengeful and destructive modality. Monkey-King’s tale is, like the others with which it thematically and visually dialogues, a cautionary one, as its unfolding highlights. Initially willing to forfeit his soul for god-like authority to become the deity he desires, he is eventually checked by the most powerful of all gods, TzeYo-Tzuh, who buries him under some rocks for five hundred years to stop his indiscriminate and (self) destructive behavior. Later, Monkey-King is released from his prison by the humble and highly revered monk Wong Lasi-Tsao, who becomes his teacher on life’s journey towards selfunderstanding. Monkey-King learns humility and acceptance of self and to use his powers of transformation wisely in his journeying through the world. Yang’s use of the animal-human interconnection serves a double purpose of calling up familiar racist taunts around people as animals while simultaneously serving to broaden the boundary around what counts as human. This double-entendre features in all three tales. Monkey-King’s story strongly echoes Jin Wang’s desire to belong to American culture and his awareness of not fitting in and it recalls Danny’s rejection of Chin-Kee and any kinship with him, in his desire to stay safely located within his own cultural grouping. Yang seals these connections in a series of powerful

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physical and playful transformations of characters in the concluding pages of the novel where all three of the stories are conjoined. Jin, now an adolescent and feeling rejected by others, and having also rejected his close friend Wei-Chen, is revealed to be Danny. In wishing to be an all-American boy/adolescent, he has, like Monkey-King, assumed the authority of the dominant culture and rejected his Chinese heritage and identity. This transformation at this stage in the novel enables us to see that Danny has been summoned as a more powerful identity by Jin in the same way as the Monkey-King calls up a more powerful self. Both have done this to counter their experiences of being othered and alienated. As Danny, Jin attacks Chin-Kee, the source of his discomfort. In so doing, he effects another transformative process, morphing into his “real” self, Jin Wang. Chin-Kee reveals that he is in fact the Monkey-King come to “serve as a conscience – as a signpost “to his “soul” (Yang 2008, 221) in order to effect a rapprochement between Jin and Wei-Chen who lost his way after Jin’s betrayal of him. This rapid series of stunning transformations, in keeping with the visual and thematic efficiencies of the traditional comic book style, highlights the often complex psychological/emotional trauma of identity realisation at the borders between cultures. Disrobed of his Chin-Kee identity, the Monkey-King offers the advice that he has learnt “how good it is to be a monkey” (Yang 2008, 223). This humble and simple message, the acceptance of self with its corollary the acceptance of others, has a final transformative effect. As Monkey-King departs, he leaves behind a docket with the number of a Chinese restaurant on it. Sometime later Jin (now no longer in Danny mode) and Wei-Chen meet at that restaurant and the novel concludes with the firm possibility of their reconciliation. The fact that they achieve this at a site that is Chinese yet operating within the American setting, without either effacing the other, suggests the significance of the title in its emphasis on cultural dialogue predicated on the acknowledgement and play of differences. Friedman notes that borders can be “sites of murderous acts”, violence and hatreds, but they can also be “locations of utopian desire, reconciliation, and peace” (Friedman 2002, 3). Yang’s text, with its three separate yet interrelated stories, works with both of these border paradigms, acknowledging however, that the transition from the negative to the positive is never easy or even complete. American Born Chinese is a clever and lively multiple layered graphic novel, comically entertaining as well as instructive, favouring the more conventional full-colour comic form with its caricatured representations, its shorthand onomatopoeic visual clues, action sequences reminiscent of the Superhero comics, and its minimal use of voice-over and description.

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Segments of the three major narratives are positioned to best segue into each other catching a mood or a scene which carries over into the next, and each narrative relates dialogically with the others in terms of the central issue of identity formation which is, for Asian-Americans, a “complex balancing act between acculturation and assimilation” (Boatright 2010, 474). The form is especially suited to a youth culture familiar with switching registers from the real to the surreal, the real to the virtual, and it applies its moral with a benevolent zaniness that allows it to be a sugarcoated comic cautionary tale rather than an overly politically correct one. Each of the three stories can stand independently of each other, but it is evident that the interweaving of them is an essential artistic choice to disrupt the spatio-temporality of each tale, making the themes they share universal and enduring ones. Less inviting than American Born Chinese, and more deeply engaged with troublesome knowledge, Marjane Satrapi’s dark memoirs of Iran as a child and later young adult, Persepolis and Persepolis 2, share Yang’s concerns around cultural differences, structures of domination and subordination and the ways in which identity formation is caught up in the struggle to belong, to be “at home”.

Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood and Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return— Marjane Satrapi Ervand Abrahamian notes that new forms of historiography summon “newer ways of writing ‘recalcitrant events” whose “very telling calls into question the terms on which the big story has been told” (Abrahamian 2002, n.p.). He calls this approach a “history from below”, and is specifically interested in the political memoirs that have emerged out of Iran in the wake of the 1979 revolution. He notes: Although most are written by members of the ruling elite both from the previous and the present regimes, some have come from the subaltern especially from activists from leftwing parties and the labour movement. (Abrahamian 2002, n.p.)

Satrapi’s texts Persepolis (2003) (first published in France as Persepolis 1 in 2000 and Persepolis 2 (2004) (first published in France as Persepolis 2 in 2001) reflect this approach in that they are subaltern memoirs that engage with the “big story” of the Islamic Revolution from the perspective of ordinary people caught up in the larger moments of Iran’s history. Both books recount, in pared down, stark-lined black and white images, and

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from first person perspective, Satrapi’s experiences of life as a young child (Marji) and later young woman (Marjane) living in and outside of Iran for various periods. Satrapi claims in her introduction to Persepolis (2003) that her raison d’etre was to provide a picture of Iran that counters the dominant Western representation of it as a site of “fundamentalism, fanaticism and terrorism”, declaring that “an entire nation should not be judged by the wrongdoings of a few extremists” (Satrapi 2003, n.p.). Despite this advocacy, her texts have been read unfavourably by many Iranians who suggest she contributes to the unflattering stereotype she claims to be denouncing. Other critics take issue with what they see as the unreliability of the narrator purporting to offer an “accurate” account of her life when in fact she has spent most of it outside her home country. The animated French film version of the text which Satrapi produced and directed with Vincent Parannoud, has added to the controversy around the texts’ references to the dark side of the Islamic revolution. American and French critics were unanimous in their praise of what they saw as a brave story from a young woman who dared to be critical of the Islamic revolution. On the other hand, Iranian critics and officials of the Iranian government saw the film as "Islamophobic" and "anti-Iranian". It was banned in Iran and in several Islamic regions and countries because of this. In Lebanon, some clerics found the film to be "offensive to Iran and Islam." The ban was later revoked after an outcry in Lebanese intellectual and political circles. Iranian film critic Hossein Moazzezinia complained that it had not told the whole story, and that Satrapi was selective in presenting her narrative, overlooking the fact that the people appeared in their millions in support of the imam (Khomeini), and criticising Satrapi’s text for suggestions that such figures were fudged and manipulated (2008, n.p.). Thus the politics of representation is as much a part of what makes these graphic novels popular as their insight into the politics and history of Iran from a non-official perspective. Chute refers to the risk-taking that Satrapi’s graphic narratives take in “offering us texts that suggest the importance of cultural intervention and visual-verbal mapping in the ongoing project of grasping history” (Chute 2008b, 107). The focalisation in Persepolis and Persepolis 2 is Satrapi’s, her visualisation and memory of events driving the themes of the narrative. Through these often disturbing projections of the past, the texts perform the work of what Chute calls the “ethical verbal and visual practice of ‘not forgetting’ about the political confluence of the everyday and the historical” (Chute 2008b, 94). In this mode Satrapi as the young Marji, and later as the older Marjane, situates herself as a “multiple subject” whereby she places her “self” in the frames (of events, and of the pages ), and also

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reflects upon its situated-ness. In the first book, she projects herself as an educated middle-class girl living in privileged circumstances in Tehran, Iran during the Islamic Revolution of the late seventies. Marji’s memories of growing up in Iran during and after the revolution conclude with her eventual escape to Vienna as a result of her parents’ concern for the political oppressions of her home country. Book two records her varied and often unhappy experiences as she matures into young adulthood and records her later return to Iran disenchanted by the West. As a transnational who has lived in other countries and cultures, Satrapi captures in her self-portrait both confining and liberating contexts inside and outside of Iran. By the end of the second book, Marji, now ten years older than when she first left Iran, leaves her country under her own volition, no longer able to settle there as an adult with any degree of comfort or sense of belonging. Indeed belonging and alienation are central themes in Persepolis and Persepolis 2 in their illustrations of the direct and indirect effects of sexual, class and religious politics on ordinary lives. At the beginning of Persepolis, we are presented with Marji’s potted visual history of Persia (now Iran), a history that is narrated with a sense of pride, creating a noble past that she and her family claim and embrace. The use of the old name for Persia, Persepolis, as the title of these texts reinforces its cultural and historical value, and it is against this honorable version of her country’s history and culture and Marji narrates her story and that of her family in more recent history. Specifically she engages firstly with the reign of the hated Shah which affected the lives of her grandparents and parents, then the aftermath of the “glorious” secular revolution during which the more extreme Islamic factions rose to power. The crude monochromatic drawings (blacks, greys, whites) in the first book are skewed to Marji’s perspective and are informed by her spontaneous emotional reactions and her abbreviated understanding of the larger canvas of events and circumstances. Chute notes that the narrative’s power is animated by “the radical disjuncture” between the “minimalism” of the drawings and the “infinitely complicated traumatic events they depict: harassment, torture, execution, bombings, mass murder” (Chute 2008b, 99).This representational mode emphasises the ways in which the political is also deeply personal. Davis writes of this dual perspective: Satrapi intelligently juxtaposes her own experiences with the larger political scene, consistently privileging the personal over the political, but always limning the connection between the two. (Davis 2005, 272)

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The visual register of the text dialogues with the verbal to effectively create the nexus. For example, in the first few frames of Persepolis, Marji introduces herself and her classmates post the revolution at the point where the revolution that ousted the Shah has been hijacked by the Islamic fundamentalists. The authorities have ordained the separation of sexes in the schools, the elimination of any Westernised influences and a dismantling of bilingual content in school curriculum. The panels project the situation from Marji’s point of view. She is a ten year old Iranian girl, and along with her classmates, she reacts to the new regime in child-like ways devoid of a deeper understanding of the surrounding political enmeshments. Marji interprets the change as a personal loss, and one that is immediate to her situation (that is, loss of friends). She projects/imagines the person responsible as a generic male authority figure issuing orders—his power stressed by the repetition of his face looming larger in subsequent panels. All Marji knows is that before the revolution she did not wear the veil and was a happy student in a mixed sex classroom and afterwards she was not. The political events in Persepolis are refracted through the “processes of childhood and adolescence” (Davis 2005, 273) making it a text that conveys troublesome circumstances that strongly impinge upon yet are also deflected by Marji’s young age and limited life experiences. Reference, for example, is made to the torture and killing of many Iranians who opposed the Shah, paving the way for the revolution. Marji, weaned on Marx by her liberal minded parents, decides she wants to participate with her parents in public demonstrations against the Shah’s tyranny. Her response, Satrapi reminds us, is child-like, existing at the level of the imaginative, and unconscious of real dangers as she role-plays possible revolutionary positions she could adopt: Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Leon Trotsky. Satrapi’s visuals in the narrative accentuate the conflicting and contradictory relationships between the subjective and the social, the personal and the political. A little later, Marji hears the story told by her Marxist Uncle Anoosh about great uncle Fereydoon who, after proclaiming Azerbaijan as a separate Iranian republic, is captured and executed by the Shah. Anxious for heroes in her family, and reacting only to the heroic dimensions of her great uncle’s story, Marji claims bragging rights over her peers with this family history (Satrapi 2003, 61). It is only when her favourite Uncle Anoosh is subsequently captured, tortured and later killed under the Islamic regime and for similar political reasons, that the political touches the deepest levels of the personal, marking the point where the once religious Marji renounces her faith (Satrapi 2003, 70-71). As she gets older, Marji’s personal reactions become more informed by

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her growing awareness of the political situation in her country. This necessitates a change in narrative style. Her newly acquired knowledge is revealed in a form of voice-over effect as, for example, in her comments about Iran’s need to sustain the war with Iraq and to repress opposition within so that the Islamic regime can remain in power. Satrapi’s text at these broader political revelatory junctures nevertheless does not lose sight of the ways in which they resonate with personal experiences, and with subconscious/unconscious levels of being in the world. In the example just cited, patterns of power, authority and rebellion assume familial and familiar form as Marji comments that “As for me, I sealed my act of rebellion against my mother’s dictatorship, by smoking the cigarette I stole from my uncle two weeks earlier. It was awful but this was not the moment to give in” (Satrapi 2003, 116-117). In his preface to the 2003 Penguin edition of his seminal work Orientalism, Edward Said writes of the dichotomy of the West and the Arab Islamic world that has gained radical and more racialised ascendancy in the wake of the events of 9/11: …neither the term Orient nor the concept of the West has any ontological stability; each is made up of human effort, partly affirmation, partly identification of the Other. That these supreme fictions lend themselves easily to manipulation and the organization of collective passion has never been more evident than in our time, when the mobilizations of fear, hatred, disgust and resurgent self- pride and arrogance—much of it having to do with Islam and the Arabs on one side, "we" Westerners on the other—are very large-scale enterprises. (Said 2003, xlv)

According to Davis, Satrapi’s texts engage critically with this simple dichotomous representation complicating the binary opposition between the West and Arab-Islamic cultures, between the secular and the religious, between parents and child, between social classes, between home and away/exile. This layered effect enables condemnation of all kinds of oppressive circumstances from the personal to the politically and socially structured. There are many examples of this in both books. In Persepolis, Marji’s father’s treatment of their maid Merhi, betrays class oppression— “In this country you stay within your own social class” he tells Marji (Satrapi 2003, 37). In criticising Marji’s close relationship with Merhi, Marji’s father fails to see the similarity between his own views and actions and the oppression exercised at the socio-political levels he and his family members have experienced and vehemently oppose. Marji’s relationship with Merhi, portrayed visually as an innocent, girlish intimacy, reveals the hypocrisy of her father’s attitude and points to inherited attitudes around

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class and social status that often go unquestioned. The representation of the West in Satrapi’s novels, as does the representation of Iran, fails to confirm a simplistic and hierarchical polarisation of the West and the rest. In fact it contests “The mythology of our [Western] freedom” as “unbounded and unmediated”, and depending precisely on this other world, on what happens over there” (Murphy 1990, 162). Before she is sent to Vienna for her own safety by her parents (at the end of the Persepolis), Marji fills a jar with Iranian soil from the family garden. Despite all that has happened to her family and her country through the revolutionary upheavals, this gesture posits the importance of the home/land as one as that clearly inhabits the complex unconscious processes through we try to establish a sense of belonging. Persepolis 2 devotes a considerable amount of chronological time and graphic space to Marji’s life experiences in Europe which are by no means straightforward or without trauma and which eventually lead her home. Marji’s severance from Iran at the end of Persepolis anticipates the vacillation between home and “exile” that characterises her experiences in the West in Persepolis 2 (2004). She is at one level the outlier, the refugee who is not made or does not feel welcome, often forced to defend and indeed embrace her identity as Iranian. She is also the observer of, as well as participant in, a new culture about which she knows little and in which she must try to find a place, a home. Satrapi’s graphics calibrate this journey as complex emotionally and ideologically, and not a simple move from a situation of oppression to one of unmitigated freedoms. When she first arrives in Vienna, Marji is sent by her mother’s good friend, ex-pat Iranian Zozo, to a boarding school run by nuns. Satrapi demonstrates the universality of repressive power across time and cultures in her drawings of the head nun who is just as sinister and threatening as the figures of the more zealous Islamists in Persepolis. The series of panels that depict Marji being reprimanded and punished by the Mother Superior for daring to confront their unjust regime feature Marji in the foreground in shadow silhouette confronted by the nun behind her desk, her face framed by its severe habit and etched with distaste and accusation. The final panel in the sequence visually reverses the power relationship between Marji and the Mother Superior. Marji is now turned towards the reader, her facial expression determined, her speech bubble in Iranian script and indecipherable to the nun who is now dwarfed and completely in the background. Marji’s parting reflection on her situation is: “In every religion you find the same extremists” (Satrapi 2004, 24). Likewise Marji is very judgemental about Zozo’s wholehearted embracing of the capitalist West and its facilitation of her rise in status (Zozo was her husband’s

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secretary in Iran and is now wearing the pants because of her husband’s present loss of status in Vienna). At this early stage of Marji’s experience of the West, her Marxist views condemn Zozo’s situation as an inevitable consequence of the capitalist system, unalloyed by any concerns around sexual politics which will later play out in Marji’s own life on her return to Iran. As a significant amount of the narrative space of Persepolis 2 engages with Marji’s journey into womanhood, sex and sexual politics become central to the themes of alienation and belonging, home and away. Marji, now Marjane, firstly observes her sexuality from the framing perspective of her native culture and her relationship with her mother, but gradually, with fewer signposts, through her own experiences in the new cultural space. Marjane’s body and her embodied self function in the narrative as the sites at which power and gender, sexuality and the social, are played out. The visualisation of Marjane’s memories of this “self”, frame it as both subject and object of scrutiny. In her analysis of Satrapi’s style in Persepolis 2, Elahi notes that Satrapi throughout the narrative frames herself in multiple ways “thus inviting the reader to see her as a complex individual in search of an identity, and secondly, to identify with this complex individual by seeing her through the frame of the comic book narrative and its panels” (Elahi 2007, 315). An example of this double framing effect is the section entitled The Vegetable, in which Marjane, experiencing a growth spurt between her fifteenth and sixteenth years, represents her body as fragmented and ugly. A series of panels within the frame reveal a series of head, hand, feet, profile, chest and bottom shots, all verbally notated by Marjane’s disparaging comments culminating in her pronouncement that “In short, I was in an ugly stage seemingly without end” (Satrapi 2004, 35). The page that follows reveals a series of panels in which Marjane tries out various hairstyles, each effectively signposting a movement into an identity that she feels is acceptable to her and to her new friends. However the metamorphosis as this section demonstrates comes at a cost in that Marjane’s attempts to “assimilate” result in her public eschewing of her Iranian identity. The sequence of events in The Vegetable drives the point that one can never forget the past and indeed to deny it is an unnecessary and damaging betrayal of self and home. Marjane is brought back to this position through the memories and dreams of her family, her guilt at rejecting her past, and the derisive reactions of others to her Iranian identity. She finally embraces and acts decisively on her grandmother’s remembered advice: “Always keep your dignity and be true to yourself”, by proclaiming to a group of gossiping girls: “I am an Iranian and proud of it!” (Satrapi 2004, 43). This scene

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foregrounds Marjane’s enlarged angry profile rendered in a single expressive line on the right hand side of the panel, the words in large uneven print spitting from her mouth and directed at the group of cowering girls in the left hand corner of the frame. Zaleski says of Satrapi’s graphic style that it is “deceptively simple: it’s capable of expressing a wide range of emotion and capturing subtle characterization with the bend of a line” (2003, 58). Despite small victories such as these and occasions in which Marjane experiences a strength of resolve and rewarding times with her politically minded friends, Marjane’s relationship with the new culture and its inhabitants is always ambivalent, marking the liminal experience of the migrant who never really leaves and also never really arrives. She proudly embraces her Iranian cultural identity and her family against which she measures the strangeness of the new country; she willingly embraces the personal freedoms offered by the new culture, yet her experiences are not without their darker consequences. Constantly thwarted in her search for love and a place to belong, betrayed by boyfriends, one of whom uses her to acquire drugs, alienated by adult authority figures such as her landlady, Frau Schiller, she resorts to regular drug taking, a path that very quickly leads her to the streets, penury and illness. The bewildering drama of this darkest period of her life in Vienna is captured in the section entitled The Veil, the most notable of which is a half-page satellite map of the Vienna tramways in white intersecting parabolas against a black background, with the small silhouette of two train carriages poised at the top of the downward curve of one of the tracks. This panel shares the page with two smaller ones that precede it; the first panel featuring Marjane about to board the train, the second framing her inside asleep on a seat and leaning against the window. The combined effect of these three panels, as the first two give way to the larger panel of the tramway maze, economically suggests both the desire to belong and the alienating complexity of her experiences in the new culture. This is reinforced by the accompanying annotation: “For almost a month, I lived at this rhythm: the night prostrate and the day letting myself be carried across Vienna by sleep and the tramway” (Satrapi 2004, 34). It is shortly after this period, when Marjane collapses then recovers from severe bronchitis that she decides to return to her family in Tehran. Indeed family, particularly her mother has been the anchor point for her throughout her childhood and adolescence, so it is not surprising that it is family that finally pulls her home. From the section entitled The Return to the concluding segment of the narrative, the ironically named The End, Marjane’s journey is back to

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family but also to a homeland riven by war and driven by fundamentalist and restrictive Islamic laws and practices. Indeed the image of the Vienna tramway is in many ways a visually anticipatory symbol of Marji’s torturous experiences on her return to her homeland. For Marjane, the social contract around female behaviour, entitlements, aspirations and desires is not one she readily accepts, and increasingly she rubs against the manifest forms of this oppression. Taking up the veil again as an adult, repeats the experiences of her childhood but without the child-like curiosity, innocence, and playfulness that once accompanied it. Wearing the veil now becomes solidified as an emblem of all things repressive and oppressive; not wearing the veil symptomatic of sensual and unrestricted freedoms. As Marjane notes in the accompanying verbal discourse: “our behavior in public and our behavior in private were polar opposites” (2004, 151). Two contrasting panels on the one page demonstrate this bifurcation with the first one featuring Marjane with groups of her student friends wearing full Islamic garb, and the one underneath and of equal size depicting the same gathering of women in modern secular clothes accentuating their female forms. Here again the body is the site at which power within the context of political oppression can be registered, although it is not a power that can be acted upon in terms of concerted political resistance. Many scenes illustrate this, and while they are in some ways softer echoes of the forms of annihilation experienced by her family members throughout her childhood in Iran, they nevertheless exact the same price of self-denial in the public space. Except for the significance of the home and family as a constant source of succor and confirmation of an identity that Marjane embraces, the terms and conditions of her life in the wider social world are governed by a regime that blunts and punishes her sense of self. Liora Hendelman-Baavvur argues that Marjane is a placeless, “identity-less” person on her return to Iran but attempts to “become domesticated” by marrying her first husband Reza and seeking the compensatory value of art by enrolling in Art College (2008, 55). However, both matrimony and the Islamic fundamentalist establishment continue to exert their “suffocating” presence to the extent that Marjane finds release in her final self-imposed exile from her homeland (Hendelman-Baavvur 2008, 55). Throughout both memoirs, “home” is increasingly synonymous with family, as the final page of panels, with its burden of loss and belonging implies. Marjane is featured behind the glass pane of Mehrabad airport, in full Islamic dress, happily waving goodbye to her beloved parents and grandmother who has turned away from Marjane facing the reader with tears leaking down her face. Marjane’s voice over at the top of the panel remarks “ the goodbyes were much less painful than

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ten years before when I embarked for Austria…” while the words at the bottom inform us that her grandmother died two years later and that “freedom had a price” (Satrapi 2004, 187).

Shake Girl: The Stanford Writing Project While the Persepolis texts are personal memoirs of the singular self experiencing life from inside a familiar culture, the starkly minimalist drawings of Shake Girl (2008) construct life in another culture from an outside, Western cultural perceptive while suggesting, through the representational form, that it is an inside, “bottom up” experience. Unlike the other graphic narratives discussed in this chapter, Shake Girl is not written by an established author, and it illustrates the ways in which the graphic form is now considered a legitimate part of the creative and cultural endeavours of mainstream academia. Shake Girl was an outcome of a course on the graphic novel in 2008 at Stanford University in the United States, in which two instructors “assigned their students to write, edit and illustrate a collaborative final project” (Berton 2008, n.p.). The novel was produced by fifteen middle-class American students under the supervision of their two instructors and was inspired by the work of Eric Pape, a journalist studying at Stanford who “offered the class his nonfiction piece …about the phenomenon of acid attacks against women in Cambodia” (Berton 2008, n.p.). Their collective project was subsequently based on the “true story of a Cambodian karaoke performer Tat Marina who was the target of an ‘acid attack’ after she had an affair with a married man” (Berton 2008, n.p.). The altruistic, ideological and aesthetic goals of Shake Girl function as a kind of redemptive balm from a First World Country free of the traumas of sexual and political oppression to a Third World country denying its ordinary citizens basic human rights. This cultural difference, predicated on the implied superiority of the American way of life, plays out in the textual politics of the novel in terms of characterisation, perspective and the narrative arc. Gloria Anzaldua writes, “Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them…” (1987, 3). Shake Girl keeps these borders between us and them firmly in place. This is not to say that the authors were not well intentioned; rather to point to the problems arising when one speaks/writes/draws from a privileged un-critiqued position on behalf of an “other”. The eponymous “shake girl” is so named because she sells fruit shakes from a cart outside the torture museum in Phnom Penh; as she comments,

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“the tourists want to get genocide off their minds, and the tips are great” (The Stanford Graphic Novel Project 2008, 4). Shake girl supports her family in this way, particularly her ailing father, while dreaming of becoming a famous dancer like her idol, film star Pilka. Living in the underclass, she is discovered by a government official Frankie, who offers her a waitress position in a karaoke bar, and, as seems to be the custom with many men in power in the Cambodian regime, installs her as his mistress. As also appears to be the case, the wives of these powerful men arrange for the death or maiming of their mistresses once their presence is discovered. Shake girl is one such victim who is severely disfigured as a result of a vicious acid attack. The sexual politics of this situation are slowly and somewhat insidiously revealed to the reader in juxtaposition to the vulnerable and child-like perspective of shake girl. Aware of her country’s history and of the horrors of the Khmer Rouge, the fourteen year old shake girl’s ambitions to be a dancer entice her to construct her life with her “protector” in romantic terms with its concomitant guarantees of lifelong happiness and material benefit as bulwark against poverty, family breakdown and vulnerability (The Stanford Graphic Novel Project 2008, 29). There is much in this formula that resembles the American dream, but it is counterpoised in the narrative by a sense of threat developed through visual staccato statements and filmic panning effects that build a sense of foreboding as the story unfolds largely within the male dominated sites of recreational and political officialdom in the Cambodian capital. Male authority characters are universally portrayed as cartoonishly sinister (black or white suits, cigars, sunglasses) while the appearance of an official from the former Pol Pot regime in the karaoke bar, accompanied by the iconic image of a mountain of skulls from the killing fields, indexes the black history of Cambodia. In many sequences, gutters perform important interpretive work as we are invited to consider what might be happening behind the scenes in counterpoint to what we actually see or what shake girl sees in the frame. For example, Frankie, her mature, married male lover, who later confesses he is a government official and ex-Khmer Rouge, invites shake girl to accompany him to a party, which turns out to be a first wives’ club. Frankie is admonished by his superiors for taking her there, and while we are witness to this disclosure, shake girl is not. Later, when Pilka, (shake girl’s idol and the mistress of the Cambodian Prime Minister) is killed, shake girl and her sister are shielded from the truth—that Pilko has been the victim of the Prime Minister’s wife’s vengeful attack on her. Being protected from the truth this way adds to shake girl’s vulnerability and the horror of the acid attack that she later

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endures. The dual perspective, ours and shake girls as well as the sinister suggestions contained in the gutters between the panels has the cumulative effect of reinforcing the construction of shake girl as victim of her cultural positioning and her country’s history despite her occasional insights and perceptions. As her name suggests, shake girl is constructed as a representative figure symbolic of women’s oppression in a country far, far away and so unlike America. This is particularly driven home when shake girl discovers that she has a half-brother living in the United Sates. When he visits her in Cambodia, a successful medical assistant who has managed to escape the horrors of the Khmer Rouge, he brings with him a cultural otherness and the promise of hope to which she is instantly attracted. He is an incarnation of the American Dream of success and safety. Shake girl comments approvingly that he is “so American he stuck out like an ox in a rice field. We loved having him here” (The Stanford Graphic Novel Project 2008, 123). The narrative at this juncture however, gestures towards the kind of fruitful exchange that can occur at the meeting of two cultures and across borders (Friedman 2002). Part of shake girl’s brother’s function in the text appears to be to reclaim a Cambodian origin and history prior to the killing times, as he visits historical sites and falls in love with the country he left behind. This restitution and valorisation of the past, however, is later overwhelmed by the horror of the acid attack on shake girl which is portrayed in a sequence of images of her melting face with little accompanying written text. Later, shake girl’s half-brother, who, like herself and her family is never named, facilitates her escape to the United States and supervises her rehabilitation after the attack. In the last few pages of the text, shake girl is depicted emerging tentatively from her traumatised state to view her new world, accepting that underneath all of her scars she is still herself. A series of six equal sized panels on one of the pages makes effective use of white and black to underscore the difference between then and now, between the past and the future, and by extension between Cambodia and America. Literally and symbolically shake girl pulls away a black curtain to let the lightness in (The Stanford Graphic Novel Project 2008, 208). The last page is a large panel framing a cozy domestic shot of shake girl, looking at us, smiling, from the window of her new home, a bird in a tree outside, the doorway behind her in the background silhouetting the non-threatening figure of her brother (The Stanford Graphic Novel Project 2008, 210). The happy ending provides a comforting conclusion, particularly for white Western readers, but it runs the risk of re-enforcing the hierarchical

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binary that Murphy identifies when he writes: “The mythology of our (United States) freedom, unbounded and unmediated, depends precisely on this other world, on what happens over there” (1990, 162). Shaun Tan’s The Arrival also deals with binaries created by cultural borders and the complex processes of finding a place to belong in his account of one man’s migration to a new world.

The Arrival – Shaun Tan The work of Asian-Australian prize-winning graphic artist and animator, Shaun Tan, has garnered a wide and appreciative audience amongst readers of all ages in Australia and on the international scene in recent years. His compelling fantasies, with their quaint hybridised figures and hieroglyphic hypertexts, mark the uniqueness in his approach to the graphic form, his embracing of the visual register as a carrier of narrative meanings. In this sense, as Rosemary Johnston argues, Tan’s approach is to constitute “words-in pictures”: that is to say that images are in themselves a language and as such call on readers to “read” rather than simply “view” them (Johnston 2012, 422). This is certainly the case with one of Tan’s most elaborate and carefully crafted publications, The Arrival (2006), which, unlike the others in this chapter, is a silent text that works its meanings through the creation of a visual cosmology that “require(s) careful looking in order to decode visual signs, construct sequences and generate hypotheses that will be confirmed or redefined as the reading progresses” (Farrell et al. 2010, 198). Indeed Hunter points out the various silent cinematic effects that Tan uses —“montage, flashbacks, lighting effects, back stories, and subtle shifts in framing and color…long shot and close up” (Hunter 2011, 14). The combination of narrative registers (the realistic and the fantastical) also invites active decoding rather than passive viewing. Indeed the reader is firstly invited into the book in a quite specific way by its very appearance. It is packaged cleverly as a simulacra of an old, frayed-at-the-edges photograph album containing sepia photos, both large and small, multiple or singular on the page. The pages of the narrative are not numbered, adding to the illusion created of a real photograph album, capturing “truthful” moments in the life of the narrator. Hunter notes readers are heavily “implicated and involved as costorytellers” in the text from the moment they hold the album, and at the same time are situated as audience members “watching a silent film, or a piece of theatre” privy to personal lives and intimate emotions (Hunter 2011, 15). Thus Tan’s art invites the reader into a kind of narrative rubik’s cube which invites alignments and misalignments. Tan argues in Sketches

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From A Nameless Land: The Art of The Arrival (2006) (the accompanying exegetical volume to The Arrival) that as readers, we are the new arrival, “only able to decipher meaning and value from visual images, object relationships and human gestures, and then only by making creative associations” (2006, 31). It is precisely Tan’s storyteller’s ability to involve his readers both actively in deciphering story and emotionally in embedding them in it, that lends critics to proclaim his artistic ability to deliver important social issues. Tan’s rich, intertextual visual metaphors poetically amplify the issues that are central to his work; how we deal with difference, alienation and belonging, how transmigration leads to encounters with otherness that can be useful and transformative. Always a very vocal and insightful annotator of his own artistic endeavours, Tan admits: “Consciously or otherwise, I’ve always been attracted to stories about characters who find themselves lost, displaced, in an unfamiliar world or experiencing some other troubled sense of belonging” (Tan 2006, 10). As in the other graphic novels discussed in this chapter, The Arrival articulates the stories of a number of lost and displaced people. In this case the story is largely told from the perspective of a young male migrant, who reluctantly leaves his wife, child and home country in the hope of finding a “better”, less politically and socially oppressive life in another country across the sea. Central to the migrant’s story and his journey to a different place, are the concepts of home and away in which the journey (emotional and physical) plays a pivotal role. In Tan’s pictorial, our migrant’s home is firstly depicted as a site of domestic and familial closeness, but within a setting which clearly signifies, “both belonging and incipient loss” (Johnston 2012, 428). This is conveyed by a series of nine small panels on the first page of the text in which there variously sit an origami bird, a clock, a hat and towel, a pot, a child’s drawing of happy family group, a broken teapot on a table, a cup of tea in broken cup with some accompanying travel tickets by ship, an open and packed suitcase of clothes, and a photo of husband wife and child. When the page is turned to the double page spread that follows it, the migrant’s emotional attachment to his wife and child is foregrounded and privileged. The nine images on the flip side of the previous page provide close-ups of the migrant’s hands devoutly, tenderly wrapping the picture of the family and putting it in his suitcase. The full page image opposite this one is a broad screen-shot in which the items from the first page are identified in their respective places within a kitchen setting, but the centerpiece of the frame is the husband and wife, their hands joined resting on the now closed suitcase, in solemn

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anticipation and apprehension of his imminent departure. What these series of images small and large convey is the idea of family as home, a notion reinforced by a later scene in which our migrant protagonist walks the streets of his home town on his way to the ship while the shadows of dragon tails pattern the buildings looming above him. The dragon tail shadows insinuate a further reason for the urgency of the immigrant’s journey—an oppressive social/political system. When the migrant finally arrives in his new lodging in the new country, he opens his suitcase on the bed and out of this emerges a miniature diorama of wife and daughter sitting at the family table back in his home country. On the walls of this new place he hangs the picture of his family; the close-up shots of their faces as he looks at the photo a measure of their place in his life. The importance of family as home enjoys extended textual life in the novel in various segments and sub stories, including the many tales told to our migrant by others who have experienced similar hardship and political oppression in their home countries. Tan’s graphic large frame renditions of these situations recall the horrors of the Nazi holocaust, Stalin’s regime of terror, the firebombing of Dresden. They starkly contrast the new situations in which the migrants now find themselves where home and family are often centrally and repetitively featured as sites of contagious contentment. The text concludes with the reunion of the migrant with his family in a suburb and house that, while strongly resembling that of his homeland featured in the opening segments of the text, is far less dystopian. Tan’s use of bird-like forms indexes the utopian nature of family and social connectivity, symbolising hope and belonging, the possibilities of the new. The first bird we encounter in section one of the novel is in origami form. The man gives his daughter the origami bird, produced magician-like from under his hat when he farewells his family at the station. On board ship, the man makes another origami bird from one of the pages of his diary, a short while later witnessing with his fellow migrants, a flock of strange half-bird half-fish creatures flying above the deck, heralding their pending arrival in the new land and later accompanying them confetti-like when their ship moves into harbour. At the entrance to the harbour of the new city, there are two gigantic statutes standing on boats full of their belongings; one statue resembles the newcomer with the baggage from his past, the other the citizen of the new place with a statue of a bird on his shoulder. In the heart of the city itself a massive sculpture of an eagle-like creature tenderly holding an egg towers above the cityscape. Towards the end of the narrative, a small bird-like creature builds its nest in a pot on the ledge outside the man’s window while the man is simultaneously featured writing a letter to his family out

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of which he makes an origami bird. By winter’s end, the bird has produced three babies and the man receives a return letter out of which he joyfully pulls an origami bird. His family arrives a short time later, ready to begin a new life. The static and the flying forms of birds throughout The Arrival confirm the importance of family, connection and communication and the transcendent promise of desire and hope as part of the personal and social journey. Despite its happy ending in which the family are re-united in the new place, and, like the birds, make a cosy nest for themselves, Tan’s book never quite allows the reader or his characters the certainty of finally arriving. Gunew argues that ambiguity accompanies the migration experience and that “there is only one certainty, that one neither leaves nor arrives” (1994, vii). Marji’s various journeys to and from her homeland in Persepolis and Persepolis 2 are distinctive reminders of just this point and in some ways her non-arrival, it is suggested, is often the only space of stability. In The Arrival, the ambiguity around the migration experience is captured in many scenes through the combination of realistic and surrealistic imagery, and the strange yet familiar landscapes. Vastly different to the sombre delineation of the migrant’s homeland, with its stark buildings, narrow lanes and shabby enclosing dwellings, the new place is represented as a futuristic city, a fantasy land of conical, circular, and pyramidal structures, and sweeping highways leading to endless possibilities. Yet despite this, the new place is also alienating, unsettling and threatening. Factories dotted in the cityscape belch out polluting smoke while the migrant is processed through an immigration centre in a dispassionate, intrusive and dehumanising way. Tan captures this in three pages of twelve panels in which the migrant is featured being given a physical check, an interview in which he clearly experiences communication difficulties, and finally his new identity on paper. The use of close-ups of the migrant’s frustrated looks and the official’s hands authorising and stamping the migrant’s new papers speak of the alienating nature of the experience. This scene stands in telling contrast to the scene of home and family at the beginning of the narrative in which the man’s hands were familiarly and trustingly linked with those of his family. When the migrant finally finds lodgings, the focus pans out from the inside shot of the man’s small room to the outside of the building to reveal his room as one amongst many such rows of windowed rooms. The effect is to suggest a prison rather than a place of newfound happiness and freedom. This impression, along with the brief glimpse of the dragon’s tail at the back of his suitcase on the bed, reminds us that the journey from one

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place to another is not necessarily a straightforward or simple one, nor are there guarantees of joyous re-settlement. Instead there is much in this book that invokes the fear and disaffection that the new can engender. The man’s attempts to find work and to (re)locate himself are played out in a new world full of perplexing customs, odd post-human animals and cryptic symbols which he has troubling deciphering. This is a graphic tactic that reinforces the experience of the outlier who, amongst other things, has to negotiate the alienating effects of a “foreign” language. The absence of recognisable words allows the experiences of the migrant to be also those of the reader as he or she tries to make sense of an alien, though inviting world, and attempts to read a foreign culture, without linguistic or cultural signposts. This de-familiarisation, according to Tan, was his intention. He comments in the accompanying compendium that “the use of incomprehensible language places us, as readers, in the mind of the protagonist” (Tan 2006, 31). Tan’s graphic novel is an aesthetically rich attempt to articulate the ambivalence and ambiguity of the migrant experience, but it is not without its critics. Boatright for example argues that Tan’s artistic homage to Ellis Island, the iconic immigration centre processing newcomers to America conjures and ratifies a particular type of migrant experience —white, Western European and male, thereby providing a limited account of the sufferings and obstacles faced by other types of immigrants. That the new arrival is ultimately successful, Boatright argues, provides a unidimensional account of migration in its focus on the ‘“good” migrant— one whose experience is “consonant with the American Dream” of success and the self-made man (Boatright 2010, 471). This perspective arguably has some validity in the light of the thousands of refugees on a global scale, who fail to find or are denied the sanctuary and success that our migrant in The Arrival does. To adopt this view however is perhaps to also undervalue the thematic and visual gifts offered by Tan’s texts, ones that make us as readers aware that while not all migrant stories are the same, they do share things that constantly rub up against each other—fear of the unknown and the new, a desire to belong, a sense of loss, an optimism about the future, a faith in human connection to transcend differences, a concern about the safety and value of family and home. Our migrant is not, at the end of Tan’s text, in a space that is vastly different to his original home. Rather he has created for himself and family a provisional space that has emerged from his encounter with another culture and way of life. He is arguably what Sarah Malik calls an “in-between subject” whose identity is formed at the “interstices of two or more cultures’ (Malik 2010, 5). This theme of hybridity is reinforced in The Arrival through Tan’s

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creation of the tadpole-dog-like creature that “adopts” the immigrant and accompanies him throughout his experiences in the new place. The “indigenous” animal is already a mix of forms, thus implying that there is not necessarily one originary identity which one can wholly claim. Moreover the migrant must learn to interpret this creature and to integrate it into his life. In this he must develop a space of communication and connection in much the same way that he needs to learn to live in the space where the old and the new cultures meet, and to find the conversations that enable positive forms of syncretisation to emerge. Tan comments on the analogy when he writes: “In this way the relationship between man and creature in the book is a metaphor for one’s connection to an environment is learned over time” (Tan 2006, 35). That connection may, as Tan’s work always implies, be grounded in the useful work of border crossing and intercultural encounters and mixings (Friedman 2002).

Conclusion Chute argues that the cultural democracy engendered by postmodernism has enabled the comic/graphic form of narrative to thrive “happily and conspicuously, in all sorts of differently marked spaces, elite and popular and in between” (Chute 2011, 356). Graphic novels have emerged within this context as sustainable and important aesthetic cultural forms, particularly viable as illustrative and informative currency for a visually literate youth culture. While there is a vast range of subject matter addressed within the field, graphic narratives dealing with social and political issues are increasingly appealing to educators who see them as useful tools for examining and expanding on matters relevant to the way we live and how we might/could live productively with others. This chapter has examined a number of graphic novels diverse in their visual and verbal delivery but focusing on a politics/history from below approach, allowing access to often challenging knowledge that contests dominant cultural positions and ideologies. Another challenge however, as the analysis of American Born Chinese, the two Persepolis texts, Shake Girl and The Arrival illustrates, lies in the way such knowledge is not only mediated through the aesthetic but also through the ways in which it is culturally received and explored.

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Works Cited Anzaldua, Gloria. 1987. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mextiza. San Francisco: Spinters/Aunt Lute. Berton, Justin. 2008. “Stanford students try writing a graphic novel.” Accessed August 20, 2011. http://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/Stanford-students-trywriting-a-graphic-novel-3214330.php#page-1. Boatright, Michael. 2010. “Graphic Journeys: Graphic Novels’ Representations of Immigrant Experiences.” Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy 53.6: 468-476. Carter, James. 2007. Building literary connections with graphic novels: page by page, panel by panel. Urbana, IL: NCTE. Cary, Stephen. 2004. Going graphic: comics at work in the multilingual classroom. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Chapman, Roger. 1999. “A comic book account of Japanese immigrants in America.” Review of The Four Immigrants Manga: A Japanese Experience in San Francisco, 1904-1924, by Henry Yoshitaka Kiyama. H-Net Humanities and Social Sciences Online, January, HNet Reviews. http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=2619. Chute, Hillary. 2008a. “The Changing Profession: Comics as Literature? Reading Graphic Narrative.” PMLA 123.2: 452-465. —. 2008b. “The Texture of Retracing in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 36.1/2: 92-110. —. 2011. “The Popularity of Postmodernism.” Twentieth Century Literature 57.3/4: 354-363. Davis, Rocio G. 2005. "A Graphic Self: Comics as Autobiography in Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis." Prose Studies 27.3: 264–279. Eisner, Will. 1985. Comics and Sequential Art: Principles and Practices of the World’s Most Popular Art Form. Tamarac, Florida: Poorhouse Press. —. 1978. A contract with God and other tenement stories. New York: DC Comics. Elahi, Babak. 2007. “Frames and Mirrors in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis.” SymplokƝ 15.1-2: 312-325. Farrell, Maureen, Evelyn Arizpe and Julie McAdam. 2010. “Journeys across visual borders: Annotated spreads of The Arrival by Shaun Tan as a method for understanding pupils’ creation of meaning through visual images.” Australian Journal of Language and Literacy 33.3: 198-210.

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Friedman, Susan. 2002. “’Border Talk’, Hybridity, and Performativity: Cultural Theory and identity in the Spaces between Difference.” Eurozine, June 7. Accessed January 17, 2011. http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2002-06-07-friedman-en.html. Gandolfo, Enza. 2006. “The Robust Imagination.” TEXT 10.1. Accessed February 6, 2012. http://www.textjournal.com.au/april06/gandolfo.htm. Gunew, Sneja. 1994. Framing marginality: multicultural literary studies. Carlton: Melbourne University Press. Gunew, Sneja. 2004. Haunted Nations: The colonial dimensions of multiculturalisms. London: Routledge. Hammond, Heidi. 2009. Graphic novels and multimodal literacy: a reader response study. Koln, Germany: Lambert Academic Publishing. —. 2012. “Graphic Novels and Multimodal Literacy: a High School Study with American Born Chinese.” Bookbird: a Journal of International Children’s Literature 50.4: 22-32. Hunter, Linnet. 2011. “The artist as narrator: Shaun Tan’s wondrous worlds.” Bookbird: a Journal of International Children’s Literature 49.4: 10-16. Hendelman-Baavur, Liora. 2008. "Guardians of New Spaces: "Home" and "Exile" in Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran, Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis Series and Azadeh Moaveni's Lipstick Jihad." HAGAR Studies in Culture, Polity and Identities 8.1: 45–62. International Institute of Social History. 2002. “Twentieth Century Iran: History from Below.” Accessed August 9, 2012. http://socialhistory.org/en/events/twentieth-century-iran-history-below. Johnston, Rosemary. 2012. “Graphic trinities: languages, literature and words-in-pictures in Shaun Tan’s The Arrival.” Visual Communication 11: 421-441. Kiyama, Henry Yoshitaka. 1999. The Four immigrants manga. Translated by Frederik L.Schodt. Berkely, CA: Stone Bridge Press. Kunzle, David. 1974. History of the Comic Strip, Vol. 1, The Early Comic Strip: Narrative Picture Stories in the European Broadsheet from c.1450 to 1825. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kunzle, David. 1999. “Political Protest: Comic Strip and the Graphic Novel”. Accessed February 6, 2012. http://science.jrank.org/pages/10893/Protest-Political-Comic-StripGraphic-Novel.html. Malik, Sarah. 2010. “Reading between the lines: Race, culture, and bounded identity in multicultural societies.” PhD diss., McGill University. Accessed August 9, 2012.

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http://search.proquest.com/docview/873966621?accountid=13380. Mallia, Gorg. 2007. “Learning from the sequence: the use of comics in instruction.” ImageText: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies 3,3. Accessed September 21, 2012. http://www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/archives/v3_3/mallia/. McCloud, Scott. 1993. Understanding Comics. New York: Harper. Monnin, Kate. 2010. Teaching graphic novels: practical strategies for the secondary ELA classroom. Gainesville, FL: Maupin House Inc. Moazzezinia, Hossein. 2008. “Rare Iran screening for controversial film Persepolis.” AFP. Accessed January 12, 2012. http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5j42rPk2BytF_ nzJMitnhfe-sP4hw. Murphy, Bruce, F. 1990. “The Exile of Literature: Poetry and the politics of the other(s).” Critical Inquiry 17.1: 162-173. Park, Hye Su. 2011. “Art Spiegleman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale: A Bibliographic Essay.” Shofar 29.2: 146-164. Royal, Derek Parker. 2011. “Sequential sketches of Ethnic Identity: Will Eisner’s A Contract with God as Graphic Cycle.” College Literature 38.3: 150-167. Satrapi, Marjane. 2003. Persepolis: The Story Of A Childhood. New York: Pantheon. —. 2004. Persespolis 2: The Story Of A Return. New York: Pantheon. Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Spiegelman, Art. 1986. Maus: A Survivor’s Tale. New York: Pantheon. The Stanford Graphic Novel Project. 2008. Shake Girl: A Graphic Novel. Accessed February 6, 2012. http://www.stanford.edu/group/cwstudents/shakegirl/. Tan, Shaun. 2006. The Arrival. South Melbourne: Lothian. —. 2006. Sketches From A Nameless Land: The Art of The Arrival. South Melbourne: Lothian. Tan, Shaun. 2012. Interview with Paul Gravett. “Shaun Tan: Strangers in Strange Lands.” Paul Gravett, August 17, 2012. http://www.paulgravett.com/index.php/articles/article/shaun_tan/. Taussig, Michael. 1993. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. London: Routledge. Tabachnick, S.E., ed. 2009. Teaching the graphic novel. New York: Modern Language Association. Weiner, Stephen. 2003. Faster than a Speeding Bullet: The rise of the Graphic Novel. Massachusetts: Nantier Beall Minoustchine Publishing.

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Wolk, Douglas. 2007. Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean. Cambridge MA: Da Capo Press. Yang, Gene Luen. 2008. American Born Chinese. New York: Square Fish. Zaleski, Jeff. 2003. “Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood (Book).” Publishers Weekly 250.28:58.

CHAPTER SIX THE POPULAR APPEAL OF ENVIRONMENTAL EPICS: THE HOBBIT, THE LORD OF THE RINGS AND AVATAR LESLEY HAWKES

Generations Y and Z are often represented in the media as being nonpolitical and fleeting in their tastes and desires. This may not be a true or full representation but it is an image that is often put forward through the mainstream media. Bradley Porfilio and Paul Carr (2008) in “Youth Culture and the Mass Media: The Implications of Media (il)literacy” found that youth were represented in various forms of mass media outlets as inherently “aberrant, violent, dim-witted, and lazy” (2). However, one social area where the younger generations appear represented in a more positive manner is in environmental concerns. It is now accepted, even in the mainstream media, that young people have a keen interest in the environment and its future. Rupert Maclean, Director of the UNESCOUNEVOC International Centre in Bonn, and Ryo Watanbe, Director of the Department of International Education in Tokyo write “environmental issues are of special concern to young people and youth, world-wide, at the current time” (quoted in Fien et al. 2002, xiv). This statement is backed up by attitudinal polling of young people that consistently finds the environment one of the major concerns of young people. For example, a 2004 Australian survey for the National Youth Affairs Research Scheme found “nine out of 10 Australians aged 12 to 28 when surveyed were either “concerned” or “very concerned” about the environment” (quoted in Partridge 2008, 18). This is not to suggest that young people have a greater interest in environmental concerns than other ages, but more to suggest that this is one social area where there is agreed acknowledgement that there is serious concern. These concerns may be expressed in a number of ways. Emma Partridge finds that there has been an increase in community

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projects that engage with the environment and youth: with “13% of respondents in 2007 reporting involvement in environmental issues— double the proportion doing so in 2005” (2008, 24). More traditional forms such as political marches or protests are still employed as well. However, many younger people also express a sense of “action paralysis”, or not knowing where to find information about creating change (Partridge 2008, 18). This feeling of uneasiness and lack of direction is often played out in their engagement with, and choice of, particular forms of popular culture. The virtues of popular culture have long been debated but as John Fiske reminds us, popular culture is the place where many people, especially, the younger generation, turn to find dialogue about issues that concern them: Popular texts are inadequate in themselves—they are never self-sufficient structures of meanings (as some will argue highbrow texts to be). They are provokers of meanings and pleasure, they are completed only when taken up by people and inserted into their everyday culture. The people make popular culture at the interface between everyday life and the consumption of the products of the cultural industries. (Fiske 2006, 122)

Popular culture becomes the “provoker of meanings”, a place where possibilities come into being. To suggest that popular culture is not an appropriate place for young people to find answers to their concerns is a misunderstanding of how meaning is made and spread in today’s society. For, as Fiske says, “our culture is a commodity culture, and it is fruitless to argue against it on the basis that culture and profit are mutually exclusive terms—that what is profitable for some cannot be cultural for others” (Fiske 2006, 121). A culture of commodity is the world most young people, especially in the West, find themselves in and it is in this world they must find possibilities and motivation for change: Popular culture is always in process; its meaning can never be identified in a text, for texts are activated, or made meaningful, only in social relations and in intertextual relations. This activation of the meaning potential of a text can occur only in the social and cultural relationships into which it enters. (Fiske 2006, 120)

One of the most popular of all genres within popular culture is fantasy. Richard Mathews admits that fantasy is a slippery term but finds that “although it is difficult to define literary fantasy, most critics agree it is a type of fiction that evokes wonder, mystery, or magic—a sense of

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possibility beyond the ordinary, material, rationally predictable world we live in” (2012, 1). Mathews’ definition brings to light the importance of the “possible” in fantasy. Epic fantasy is a particular form of fantasy, one that has “epic” or grand themes, characters and or settings. The quest undertaken by the hero in epic fantasy appears almost insurmountable and the outcome of this journey may have huge repercussions for the world at large. Epic fantasies make up some of the highest grossing films and popular books across the ages and they are prime examples of Fiske’s “culture and profit”. For example, James Cameron’s Avatar (2009), an epic fantasy set on the secondary world of Pandora, has become the highest grossing movie of all time. It is estimated that this movie grossed over 2.7 billion dollars worldwide (Breakingnews.ie, n.p.). The environmental concerns of this movie will be discussed later in this chapter, but at this stage, it is its popularity and its connection with the audience that needs to be stressed. One of the key ways this film reached and connected with its wide audience was in the technological advancements used to relay the story. From the beginning Cameron understood technology as part of the process of storytelling, and not as a negative tool to be derided and placed on the side of evil. This acceptance and use of technology resonated with its technological savvy audience. Peter Jackson’s 2001, 2002, and 2003 adaptations of the Lord of the Rings trilogy are some of the most popular and loved movies ever made. The Hobbit also looks as if it will follow this pattern, with the movie voted the most anticipated film of 2012. The Hobbit may have originally been written for 5—9 year olds but today with its cinema release its audience is far wider. Pre-film release, its book sales have “approached fifty million copies world-wide” (Bloom 2011, 66) and the numbers are certain to grow after the three films have all been viewed. Tolkien’s novels won the 2003 BBC Big Read Competition: Three quarters of a million votes were collected from television audiences, and a list of the top hundred books complied. Unsurprisingly, J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings came in first (it had done so in a similar national poll in 1997). In fact, it came in well ahead of the runner-up, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. (Falconer 2008, 24)

Jackson’s Lord of the Rings film cycle is also not only popular but critically acclaimed and has won 17 out of 30 Academy Awards nominations. The Return of the King won the 2003 Best Picture Award, the only fantasy film to do so (Lodge 2011, n.p.). It is not only young people who enjoy these movies and, in fact, one of the reasons for their

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huge blockbuster success is their ability to “cross demographic groups” (Wasko and Shanadi in Mathijs 2006, 23) and not separate their audience into restrictive age groups or types. However, the genre of fantasy is often seen by film studio executives as coming from “kiddie lit”: “At the root of this trend is a deeper tectonic change in Hollywood. For the vertically integrated congloms that own the studios, kiddies’ properties aren’t just a popular fad: they’re the perfect fuel for the synergy machine” (quoted in Wasko and Shanadi in Mathijs 2006, page 24). Rachel Falconer, in Crossover Fiction and Cross-Reading in the UK, finds that this may have been a new idea for Hollywood but children’s fiction has always been enjoyed by a number of age groups (2008, 18). Hollywood began to realise that crossover stories were hugely popular and therefore hugely profitable. There may be some who see this as a negative and as a prime example of mass commodification of culture. However, it also highlights the way different forms work together and add to each other, providing a complex network of meaning potential. This chapter examines the continuing popularity of these blockbuster epic movies and epic fantasy novels and how and why these stories are able to resonate with their audiences. I am not addressing the differences between the film adaptations and the texts as these comparisons, while interesting and insightful, shift the focus to difference in mediums rather than examining the fantasy genre and storytelling techniques employed. Falconer suggests that the reading of these crossover stories helps people work out “new ways of living in the present” (2008, 189). I would suggest that one of the main ways fantasy (both in film and text form) is able to achieve such a strong connection with its audience is in its ability to tap into contemporary concerns without becoming overly didactic or antitechnological. And one of the major concerns in our society is the environment. In the chapter “Children as Ecocitizens: Ecocriticism and Environmental Texts”, Geraldine Massey and Clare Bradford find The possibility of texts presenting an ecocentric position is problematic. The environment has no ability to speak for itself . . . All environmental discourses are constituted by humans who speak on behalf of the environment, which means humans always have the potential to adopt a patronizing, custodial approach. (in Bradford et al 2011, 114)

Epic fantasies may offer an alternative to this patronising custodial approach. There may be something about the narrative form of fantasy that enables a shift in perception and allows the potential and space for new understandings of the world in which young people must function and

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participate to emerge. The Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Hobbit, and Avatar all can be seen as having environmental themes but I would even go further and suggest they are in fact “environmental epics”. If the definition set up earlier for epic fantasy is combined with the environment, not just environment as a side concern but the environment as legitimate agent, certain fantasies morph into environment epics. The environment in an environmental epic is not merely one of its many themes, but becomes engrained in the narrative structure, and it is impossible to discuss separately or to have it removed from the story. Massey and Bradford find environmental stories are able to “thematize contemporary ecological issues” (in Bradford et al 2011, 109). The mentioned stories are indeed environmental stories. This does not mean that the narratives in these stories cannot be enjoyed in the conventional manner or other themes besides the environment cannot be found, but more that they offer alternatives to the more traditional human centric viewpoints that dominate the current fiction and film markets. This shifting of boundaries within the reading framework activates “the meaning potential of a text” (Fiske 2006, 120) and this potential can be carried over into “the social and cultural relationships into which it enters” (Fiske 2006, 120). Mathews’ definition of fantasy bringing “a sense of possibility beyond the ordinary, material, rationally predictable world we live in” does not mean these possibilities cannot be brought into the “ordinary, material, rationally predictable world” (Mathews 2012, 1). Fantasy is the space where these often neglected alternatives are given voice and, once given voice, they cannot be denied legitimacy. There are many excellent works of contemporary fiction that teach children, especially younger children, how to be more environmentally friendly in their choices. Some of these stories include the much loved The Lorax by Dr Seuss, turned into a successful 3D movie and voted number 14 on the National Education Association for Teachers’ Top 100 Books for Children; the much awarded The Great Kapok Tree by Lynne Cherry; and Tim Winton’s Blueback: A Fable for All Ages to name but a few. Each one of these stories carefully teaches children how to care for their environment. They also show how each child can become an agent of change and work for the good of society. These anthropocentric texts have the capacity to raise environmental awareness and give children a sense of empowerment. They have an important role to play in teaching children how to take responsibility and often provide step-by-step detail on how to make improvements for the good of the environment. However, one of the problems that arises from these books is they focus on a single issue, and,

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while this focus may be a good teaching tool, it does not change the overall reading perspective: Herein lies a dilemma for children’s literature, which has an abundance of texts advocating positive action to manage an endangered environment, but is seldom in a position to convey deeply informed information. (Bradford et al. 2008, 90)

Younger generations are turning not only to stories that are didactic and teach them how to sustain the environment through a human-centred approach, but also to stories that can be seen as having a deep ecological approach: stories that decentre the human and reveal a far more connected relationship between humans and their world. “Deep ecology” can be seen as the process of engaging with the environment as an active agent in its own right and shifting the boundaries of language and understanding to incorporate this belief. This deep ecological approach has been a difficult one to achieve, as it is not an easy task to move outside a human perception. A deep ecological approach that runs through the actual structure of the narrative may offer up a reason as to why Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit and Avatar have connected continually with such a wide audience. These stories are able to express what many in their audience are troubled over but lack the voice to get across. The stories enable a space for these alternative voices to emerge and speak to one another. They reveal worlds that are interconnected rather than each species living an unconnected life and reveal the complex network that runs beneath all species.

Ecocriticism While ecocriticism is a contemporary theoretical approach in relation to works of fiction, the concerns it discusses are not new and there are many books from earlier periods that focus on landscape and Nature. In the Nineteenth Century, for example, William Blake, William Wordsworth and Charles Dickens were just a few of the writers who had a strong environmental focus. Indeed, the works of these writers have found a new lease of life through contemporary environmental readings with their work being read or reread in an environmental light. Their work mainly focused on the dangers of industrialisation and the injustice of the class system. Blake’s “Earth’s Answer” from Songs of Experience, for example, dramatically foretells of the sadness of the world once it is corrupted by humans: “Earth raised up her head/ From the darkness dread and drear/

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Her light fled/ Stony, dread, / And her locks covered with grey despair” (lines 1-5), and Dickens’s Hard Times clearly tells of the outcomes of unrestricted industry and the separation of the human from Nature. Dickens writes, “The whole town seemed to be frying in oil. There was a stifling smell of hot oil everywhere. The steam-engines shone with it, the dresses of the hands were soiled with it, the mills throughout their many stories oozed and trickled it” (Dickens [1854] 1966, 85). Here the image Dickens creates is very much one of industry overtaking everything in its path. The natural environment has disappeared and the humans appear to be disappearing under the power of industry. Both these works set up a clear opposition between Nature and Industry and in both of these works it can be seen that Nature should be saved for the good of the future generations of young humans. Nature becomes a way to read the lives of the humans. The bulk of William Wordsworth’s work also sets up the possibility of each individual reconnecting with a more “natural” world to gain a sense of wholeness and energy. Although great sympathy is created for the environment in these works, the subject of these writings remain the human. We see many of these ideas being taken up in much contemporary works of fiction. However, it was the late twentieth century that saw the emergence of the actual term “ecocriticism”. The environmental movement really begin to gain societal and political strength during the late twentieth century because the earth was seen to be at crisis point with global warming and climate change becoming a reality, and by the 1990s, ecocriticism was a growing literary and cultural field. William Rueckert is credited with first using the term in his 1978 essay “Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism” but earlier writers such as Rachel Carson in Silent Spring (1962) had set the perimeters for an engagement between narrative and environmental concerns. Earlier in 1956, Carson in her well known essay “Help your Child to Wonder” published in Woman’s Home Companion, wrote that if she had a wish it would be to give children a “sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life” (Carson 1956, 28). Carson maintained that this sense of wonder would enable a bond between human and environment to become so strong that it would never be able to be broken. Carson’s Silent Spring, which has just been reissued after fifty years, revealed the impact that human decisions were having on the land and the interconnectedness between humans and their environment. Margaret Atwood says the importance of Carson’s book cannot be underestimated and its core lessons were that “the perceived split between man and nature isn’t real: the inside of your body is connected to the

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world around you” (Atwood 2012, 6). This connection has become the focus of ecocriticism. Glotfelty and Fromm, in The Ecocriticism Reader (1996), define ecocriticism as “the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment” and it is this relationship that remains the focus of all ecowriting. It has to be remembered that there is no one singular framework for an ecocritical approach, however, underlying all of the differences in approaches is the need for a shift in perception in our understanding and representation of the environment. As Mallan and Bradford remind us “ecocriticism is neither a harmonious nor a unified field. However, its various strands share a fundamental commitment to the physical world” (Mallan and Bradford 2011, 111). It is important that Mallan and Bradford make the point about the physical world rather than use the term “Nature”, because as Raymond Williams found “Nature is perhaps the most complex word in the [English] language” (Williams 1983, 219). This complexity stems, in part, from the connotations that this word brings with it. Williams alerts us to the fact that any full “history of the uses of nature would be a history of a large part of human thought” (Williams 1983, 219). Previous writings on and about Nature means that when we read the word, it automatically sets up images and connotations in our mind. These connotations immediately draw a separation between the human and the natural. When “Nature” is used, there is the tendency to think of only the “wild” or “primitive”, free from human intervention and not inhabited by humans. This separation with humans comes in part from the Pastoral mode of poetry with its focus on society before the Fall of Man. This yearning for a utopia can have the effect of making Nature appear as if it is not part of the everyday lived physical world but rather as belonging to the past. It also sets up the idea that humans and Nature are separate and exist in different worlds. However, this separation is not set in stone because as Williams says, “Nature began as descriptions of a quality or process” (1983, 219). What began as a process has changed into a binary. Ecocriticism brings the focus back to the process. Kate Soper in What is Nature?: Culture, Politics and the Nonhuman (1995) researched extensively into the relationship between humans and their environment and found there are three conventional ways in which Nature is written about and used in literature. The first way can be seen as a metaphysical concept. Humans use Nature to “think” their difference and to ask “big” philosophical questions such as “What does it mean to be human?” Using Nature in this manner constantly sets it up in a binary

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fashion: humans on one side and Nature on the other and therefore everything not human is alien and nonhuman. Not being human automatically sets the “other” up in an inferior manner. The second way Nature is used in writing is as a Realist concept. In these stories the structures and processes of Nature are used in a cause and effect manner. The cycles, the seasons and the laws of Nature are given to show the effect on human existence. These stories often reveal the spirit of humankind and tell of the struggles and hardships they must endure to survive in the Natural world. The third way Soper says Nature is used is as a lay or surface concept. The observable features of Nature are described as a backdrop to the story. The landscape becomes the grounding of the story but loses importance once the “real” human story begins. Soper goes on to suggest that these three approaches all place humans at the centre and Nature on the margins. Again, this emphasises the manner in which humans remain the subject of the stories, they are always the focus and it is their viewpoint that is privileged. John Stephens finds that in much environmental writing the focus is still very much on human subjectivity (2006, 44). The potential for literature to move past these boundaries of separation has been one of the principles that bind all contemporary ecocritical perspectives. One prime example of a recent text that addresses these issues of separation is Alice Curry’s 2013 Environmental Crisis in Young Adult Fiction: A Poetics of Earth. Curry’s analysis centres on a range of contemporary post-disaster novels for young adults and the ways in which these novels can be analysed productively and creatively as a response to environmental crisis through the use of an ecofeminist theoretical framework. (Curry 2013, 15)

Curry’s very detailed investigation finds that certain novels refute the human earth divide that has been systemically imposed and that has resulted in constructions of separation. As stated, Curry’s focus is on the application of an ecofeminst framework to particular texts. The focus of this chapter is also on the bringing down or dismantling of barriers of separation but through the examination of popular epic fantasies. I would suggest that it is epic fantasy’s potential to move beyond these boundaries of separation that make the genre appealing to its audiences and readers. Gary Snyder, the American poet and environmentalist, writes “the complexities of the natural world requires a revitalised or, perhaps better, a re-extended form of humanism which, reaching out beyond the western boundaries of humanist philosophy, enthusiastically accommodates

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the non-human with humanistic thought” (Snyder quoted in Huggan & Tiffin 2009, 208). And Helen Tiffin, one of leaders in the environmental field says, “what is probably most needed is not the capacity to think beyond the human, but the courage to imagine new ways in which human and non-human societies, understood as being ecologically connected, can be creatively transformed” (Huggan & Tiffin 2009, 215). Val Plumwood, the Australian eco-feminist, takes this idea further and believes society needs an “ethic of nature”. This “ethic of nature” has to be one that has not “polarised understanding and in which the human and nonhuman spheres correspond to two quite different substances or orders of being in the world” (Plumwood 2008, n.p.). Plumwood puts forward the idea that there is an underlying assumption in Western thought that only humans matter. And if humans choose to conserve Nature rather than exploit it the choice is driven by the fact that this is only for the sake of the utility the environment will have for future human generations. This means the divisions remain between humanity and Nature even when humans seek to look after the environment. Humans are thought to be different than the nonhuman and this difference places humans above all nonhumans. This belief comes back to the argument that humans have rational thought and nonhumans do not, therefore, humans must be “more intelligent” and have the ultimate say in the choices being made for all species. It is humans who are thought to be the species that thinks, dreams and imagines. These are important considerations when examining any creative expression of the environment because they highlight the strong preconceived notions of the environment that are brought to any interpretation and story. Lawrence Buell’s definition for ecocriticism is based on the need to move past preset binaries that have remained too long in literature. He sees ecocriticism as “upending a traditional quasi-Aristotelian fourfold framework for reading literature (plot, characterisation, theme and setting) by refocusing it around setting, the element most often neglected in Western criticism” (quoted in Payne and Barbera 2010, 206). Yi-Fu Tuan, a cultural geographer, finds that topophilia: a liking, or an instinctual regard, for a particular place, is not the strongest of human emotions and humans often struggle to express this emotion in fiction (Tuan 1974). In other words, writers of fiction have often neglected place and setting. They may give brief descriptive passages but only as a way to get into the more important story about the human characters, or if setting is described, it is used as the backdrop for the human action to occur. Setting may also be used in a thematic sense but once again it is used to explain human

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character development or human motivation. When setting is foregrounded it is often read allegorically. This leads to the emphasis of the story remaining character, plot, and theme. Setting is added to accommodate and accentuate these dominant three. However, epic fantasy as a form may offer a counter to this neglect of setting in narrative structure.

Fantasy and Ecocriticism The connection between ecocriticism and fantasy may appear strangely matched. After all, fantasy is the creation of an imagined secondary world while ecocriticism concerns itself with this physical world. However, the link between the two is strong. J. R. R. Tolkien recognised this strong connection in his famous essay “On Fairy Stories”. Tolkien insists that fantasy is not solely about created worlds but more about opening viewpoints and understanding of all possible worlds. He wrote, “it was in fairy-stories that I first divined the potency of the words, and the wonder of the things, such as stone, and wood, and iron; tree and grass; house and fire; bread and wine” (Tolkien [1964] 2001, 60). As stated earlier, Rachel Carson said one of the strengths of stories is their ability to transfer wonder and Tolkien also emphases this point. For Tolkien, fantasy is the genre that encourages this lasting sense of wonder. Fantasy as Tolkien defines it, is the genre where stones, wood, iron, tree and grass are given a sense of autonomy and legitimacy. He is also making a very strong link between language and understanding because words transfer this wonder. The understanding that Tolkien suggests is not only to understand the human perspective better but also to hear the languages of the silenced “other.” He writes: Fantasy, of course, starts out with an advantage: arresting strangeness. But that advantage has been turned against it, and has contributed to its disrepute. Many people dislike being “arrested”. They dislike any meddling with the Primary World or such small glimpses of it as are familiar to them. (Tolkien [1964] 2001, 48)

Tolkien recognises that there are many readers who may reject fantasy on the grounds that it does not follow, to reuse Lawrence Buell’s (quoted in Payne and Barbera 2010, 206) term, “a traditional quasi-Aristotelian fourfold framework” and because it does not it is immediately seen by many critics as less worthy than other genres. Eichner, Mikos and Wedel in their chapter “Apocalypse Now in

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Middle Earth: “Genre” in the Critical Reception of the Lord of the Rings in Germany” cite as an example of this devaluing the manner in which one reviewer slammed the second The Lord of The Rings film: First, for those who have missed the first part and have not read the books—they will be hopelessly lost in trying to understand what is going on. Second, for those who rightly think that fantasy is a stupid or at least not very interesting genre—they will be confirmed in their view, since this is, and doesn’t want to be anything else but, the ultimate fantasy film. Finally, for those parents who take The Two Towers to be a children’s movie—the battle scenes of explicit violence make The Two Towers even less suitable for children than the first part had already been. (in Mathijs 2006, 149)

The reviewer objects to Lord of the Rings on three different levels: it has no logical narrative, it is a genre not worthy of any serious contemplation, and it is unsuitable for children. All of these objections stem from a conventional reading of what a narrative should achieve and all of these objections privilege the adult human subject. In the first instance, the reviewer sees the narrative as illogical and irrational and reads the plot against previous human-centred plots. In the second instance, the film fails because even though it may work as a fantasy, fantasy itself is a worthless genre and the reviewer sees it as mere escapism and finally children will be shocked by what is presented in the narrative. Fantasy is being valued judged against notions of preconceived concepts of “good” narrative structure. Ursula Le Guin says “there is still, in this country, a deep puritanical distrust of fantasy, which comes out often among people truly and seriously concerned about the ethical education of children. Fantasy to them is escapism” (Le Guin 1989,69). Le Guin explains that fantasy, as a genre and form, is often seen by critics as second-rate and can offer nothing to its readers except a few hours of escapism. However, Nancy Holland offers up the suggestion that genre fiction, including fantasy, may be the place where children can build their own ethical considerations. She finds that one of the greatest strengths of genre fiction is its ability to break through the boundaries of conventional readings: “Genre fiction, then, has at least the potential to be as subversive as “literary” fiction, because it can work against, rather than reinforce, the process of normalisation” (Holland 2002, 220). It may be “normal” to read fantasy in a conventional reading manner but this does not mean this is the only reading available. The question becomes: why can’t the “normalisation” process be shifted to include other viewpoints?

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Laurence Buell finds that there are four key ways to move beyond the human-centred perception and move towards a more ecological narrative. He lists these as 1. 2. 3. 4.

The nonhuman environment is present not merely as a framing device but as a presence that begins to suggest that human history is implicated in natural history The human interest is not understood to be the only legitimate interest Human accountability to the environment is part of the text’s ethical orientation Some sense of the environment as a process rather than as a constant or a given is at least implicit in the text. (2009, 7-8)

If we go through each of these in relation to Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit and Avatar we can see that all of these four categories can be seen in operation. The nonhuman environment in The Lord of the Rings is not a framing device and Tolkien and Jackson have gone to great lengths to bring out the legitimate histories of all species, not just the humans, and to reveal how all of these histories impact upon each other. At the beginning of The Fellowship of the Ring, Tolkien writes: “The tents began to go up. There was a special large pavilion, so big that the tree that grew in the field was right inside it, and stood proudly near one end, at the head of the chief table” (Tolkien [1954] 1999, 34). From the very beginning of this story Tolkien sets up all four of Buell’s strategies for reframing texts. The tree is in the tent, inside the main story; the tree has an integral role to play in the story; decisions being made will impact on all and the tree is set up as part of the process of change. It becomes evident that, from the beginning of this narrative, the environment will neither be used as a backdrop nor in a merely descriptive manner. In Avatar, the environment is also part of the actual narrative structure. The ending of Avatar especially awakens the notion of the environment as a process rather than a constant. It also reinforces the idea that all species are connected and one species’ decisions will have a direct impact upon all other species. While the film has been seen by some critics as one more epic story that places a white male as hero and saviour I would suggest it also manages to accomplish a number of different and new things as well. One of its greatest strengths, especially in relation to a younger audience, is its ability to incorporate technology into the solution rather than just the negative cause. Technology becomes part of the process of positive change and distinct binaries are removed. The binary between good and evil still remains, however, the binary between environment and

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technology is shifted. Buell’s four keys ways to move beyond human centric viewpoints are clearly in operation in Cameron’s story. Robert Scholes’s description of fantasy as “fiction that offers a world clearly and radically discontinuous from the one we know, yet returns to confront that known world in some cognitive way,”(quoted in Mathews 2012, 4) gives a strong hint as to the attraction of these stories. These epic fantasies enable not only the space for discussion on change but also an embodiment of possible change and this change can be carried into the audience’s lived world. There would be no shift in perspective if Avatar ended with the notion that all technology is evil and its use always results in a negative impact because the audience cannot relate to that outcome. The audience’s world is filled with technological devices and these devices are part of their everyday lived world and, as such, should be part of the solution to any problems. Henry Giroux says that new electronic technologies allow kids to immerse themselves in profoundly important forms of social communication, produce a range of creative expressions, and exhibit forms of agency that are both pleasurable and empowering. (Giroux 2000, 13)

Technology must be seen as part of the process of change and create a sense of empowerment and agency. As stated, Buell’s four key categories can be seen in operation in these texts causing a shift in audience perception and awareness of other possible states of “normal”.

The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings As already mentioned, Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings trilogy are some of the most loved, watched, and awarded films of all time. These films are one more affirmation on how popular these stories are and how they resonate with audiences across the generations. Before the films were made the stories had already been translated into over 30 languages (Morgan, 2010,145). Alun Morgan says these stories continue to have a significant “impact upon the environmental and moral imaginaries of many of its readers” (Morgan 2010, 146). This statement can be seen as feeding into the earlier point I raised about a need for an “ethics of nature.” What is interesting about Morgan’s comment is the recognition of the importance of the imagination in the formation of any ethics of Nature. In Tree and Leaf, Tolkien, in defining fairy stories, states,

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I said the sense “stories about fairies” were too narrow. It is too narrow, even if we reject the diminutive size, for fairy-stories are not in normal English usage stories about fairies or elves, but stories about Fairy that is Faɺrie, the realm or state in which fairies has their being. Faɺrie contains many things besides elves and fays, and beside dwarfs, witches, trolls, giants, or dragons: it holds the seas, the sun, the moon, the sky; and the earth, and all things that are in it; tree and bird, water and stone, wine and bread, and ourselves, mortal men, when we are enchanted. ([1964] 2001, 9)

Tolkien does not create boundaries between the “real” world and the imagined world. Buell finds that “seeing things new, seeing new things, expanding the notion of community so that it becomes situated with the ecological community—these are some ways in which environmental writing can reperceive the familiar in the interest of deepening the sense of place” (2009, 677). Tolkien and Jackson create their communities in such a way so that the sense of place is deeply awakened in the readers and audience. They achieve this, as mentioned earlier, by using the nonhuman environment not only as a framing device but as a strong presence that remains throughout all the stories. In The Fellowship of the Ring Strider remarks that But I miss something, I have been in the country of Hollin in many seasons. No folk dwell here now, but many other creatures live here at all times, especially birds. Yet now all things but you are silent. I can feel it. There is no sound for miles about us, and your voices seem to make the ground echo. I do not understand it”. (Tolkien [1954] 1999, 373)

Strider implies that it is not normal to hear only one voice and he knows something is wrong because of the absence of many voices. Strider’s own voice feels isolated and empty because it is not being informed by other voices. He knows he is part of a wider interconnected community and feels the loss of this connection. Of course it is to be expected in a fantasy with its creation of secondary worlds that part of the emphasis would be on the nonhuman and descriptions of “other” worlds. To a certain extent this may be one of the reasons why fantasy is able to move through the boundaries of human centric viewpoints and open up new spaces more easily than other genres. However, it is more than merely setting up these worlds and characters. It is the continuation of alternative and connected lives that is the real strength of these stories. One of the ways Tolkien manages to accomplish this continuation of connectedness is he places the setting first and he keeps the setting as the focus of the narrative. Of course characters, plot

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and theme are still extremely important, but the setting cannot be seen as merely a backdrop for human character analysis or as a plot driver to move the action forward. In Tolkien’s work, each setting is given its own space and agency, and has a strong, legitimate, and autonomous voice. Each setting is seen as having a complex structure and each species within this structure has its own viewpoint but in the long run they each learn to listen to other possibilities and work with each other’s interest in mind. Buell writes that it is this ability to “subserve mutuality” that may bring about the greatest change in ideas: “All creatures process their environment subjectively and seek to modify it in the process of adapting to it. It is not a question of whether we can evade the ground condition but of how to make it subserve mutuality rather than propriety self-centredness” (Buell 2009, 677). John Stephens finds although extremely difficult, it is possible to construct the human subject as “intersubjectivity with an environment that includes flora and fauna as well as other humans” (Stephens 2006, 44). Indeed this is exactly what is achieved in Tolkien’s stories. The humans are only one subject within the stories and cannot be removed from their interconnectedness with their surrounding environment: They had gone some ten miles and noon was at hand when they came on a high green wall. Passing through an opening they came suddenly out of the trees. Before them lay a long lawn of shining grass, studded with golden elanor that glinted in the sun. The lawn ran out into a narrow tongue between bright margins: on the right and west the Silverlode flowed glittering; on the left and east the Great River rolled its broad waters, deep and dark. On the furthest shores the woodlands still marched on southwards as far as the eye could see, but all the banks were bleak and bare. No mallorn lifted its gold-hung boughs beyond the Land of Lorìen. (Tolkien [1954] 1999, 487)

This passage is filled with different settings and each one has its own story to tell but still is part of the larger story. Stephen’s notion of intersubjectivity becomes engrained in the narrative structure itself. The Lord of the Rings concentrates on the journey of The Fellowship which consists of Frodo who is a Hobbit, Samwise Gamgee who is a Hobbit, Merry Brandybuck and Pippin Took who are Hobbits, Gandalf who is the grey wizard, Aragorn who is human, Legolas who is an elf, Gimli who is a dwarf, and Boromir who is human, and we get to hear their different stories as well as the stories of others. Each species has its own language, stories, and history. If the environment is taken away or its voice neglected, the entire narrative falls in on itself. An example of this is in The Two Towers where it is revealed that many stories have already been

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lost because other voices have vanished. Treebeard, the fourteen foot Ent, states “many of those trees were my friends creatures I had known from nut and acorn; many had voices of their own that are lost forever now” ([1954]2002, 103). Treebeard also makes what appears a puzzling statement when he says For I am not going to tell you my name, not yet at any rate. A queer halfknowing, half humorous look came with a green flicker into his eyes. For one thing it would take a long time while: my name is growing all the time, and I’ve lived a very long, long time; so my name is like a story. (Tolkien [1954] 2002, 89)

Before he will tell the Hobbits his name they need to prove that they are prepared to listen to the story behind it, not merely take it and use it as they wish but to actually understand the complexities of it. Tolkien once said that “the word” authenticates the thing, (Tolkien quoted in Shippey, 1982, 43) and Treebeard is making sure that he is authenticated in a manner in which he thinks represents him as he should be known. The Ent also explains how the concept of a human timeframe is not the only framing that exists and he refuses to be rushed into making decisions: “I used to spend a week just breathing” (Tolkien [1954] 2002, 95). In this interchange it becomes clear that the Ent has a language, a history and a story and all of these are legitimate and important. The human-centred narrative framework is beginning to be dismantled. It is well-known that Tolkien rejected notions of allegorical readings of his stories and had written in the foreword of The Fellowship of the Ring that “it is neither allegorical nor topical” (Tolkien [1954] 1999, xvii) but this has not stopped many critics reading his and Jackson’s work in this way. For instance, Douglas Kellner writes “although Tolkien scorned allegorical readings of his Lord of the Rings cycle, I assert that the novels and the film cycle can be read as socio-political and moral-existential allegory that articulates conservative ideology” (Mathijs and Pomerance 2006, 18). Kellner goes on to drive this allegorical reading even further: “Both the novels and films are clearly conservative attacks on industrial and technological modernity, yearning for an idealized past of stable communities, social hierarchy, and romantic attachment to the soil and earth (quoted in Mathijs and Pomerance 2006, 18). This scathing attack reads Lord of the Rings from a human focussed perspective and all the voices within the story are seen to represent human viewpoints. It is indicated that any links with the physical world are outdated and display a yearning for a primitive society that is long gone in a contemporary world.

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Katherine Fowkes also follows this line of thought when she writes “the environmental destruction that emerges as the Orcs wield their mechanical advantages over the landscape links machinery with evil and sets it in harsh opposition to nature” (2010, 135). However, it is not all machinery that is linked with evil, rather a particular type of machinery, one that separates and disconnects rather than having an ethical orientation that recognises it is part of a larger connected environment. Machinery needs to be used with an awareness of place because “place always implies active reciprocal relation between inhabitant and context” (Buell 2009, 677). It is only technology and machinery that neglects the context of its operation and replaces traditional crafts without consideration that is seen as dangerous in Tolkien’s stories. The Palantiri or seeing stones, for instance, were first used as a form of communication, but it was only their misuse by Sauron that made them instruments of evil. Technology is not inherently evil or dismissed as unnecessary rather Tolkien sets technology up as needing to be seen as part of the wider community and not as existing beyond or apart from it. As mentioned earlier, if the physical “natural” world is read as primitive and pre-industrialised, it removes any focus or relevance of the concerns raised for a contemporary society. The stories remain always seen as belonging in the “Pastoral” or “Romantic” tradition. To say that Tolkien’s stories hark back to outdated Pastoral traditions is an attempt to dismiss them and the concerns they raise. Tolkien may have resisted his work being read in such allegorical terms because it again places a humanistic focus onto his work instead of opening up a space for fresh dialogue. Jackson enters into this space and opens up the dialogue. Jackson’s films entice the audience to feel the connection the other species have with their homes. Laurence Buell uses the term “place-sense” to describe “dwellings remotely like one’s own that provides a basis for erasing the line between village and outback and seeing both as variant forms of settlement in place” (Buell quoted in Lodge and Wood 2008, 674). Jackson’s films make the audience understand that others also have a “place” which they call their own. Tolkien wrote a blurb for the British edition where he described The Hobbit: “if you care for journeys there and back, out of the comfortable Western world, over the edge of Wild, and home again” (Tolkien quoted in Bloom 2011, 65). This blurb alerts the readers to a number of things. One point highlighted is that Tolkien’s story is an attempt to get past the reading boundaries set by the Western world, another is the idea that the reader will need to go beyond connotations of what is “Wild” and finally they will return to their physical world.

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Tolkien recognised that it is not enough for humans and animals to change places in the narrative to attain an effective fantasy because “men dressed up as talking animals may achieve buffoonery or mimicry, but they do not achieve Fantasy” (Tolkien 1964, 2001, 50). Fantasy is far more than giving humanistic traits to animals. It is this point that is so often missed in readings of Tolkien. He is not presenting animals as mouth pieces for human viewpoints. Rather, he is revealing the possibility of all species having a language structure that is just as complex as human language. In Tolkien’s writing, language does not solely belong to humans. There has been much written on Tolkien’s love and interest in languages and myths. What is interesting about Tolkien’s work is the way in which languages are not separated or given a hierarchy of authority. All languages are legitimate and all languages connect with one and another. The language of the trees is given the same space for legitimacy as the language of humans. This is not something that is set up as unusual in the story, it is the way the world is—a network of interconnected languages. Cary Wolfe writes that human language is only one of the vast networks of signifying possibilities across species and “the natural world is full of indicators, signs, communicators associated with diverse and mostly opaque modes of intentionality and references” (Wolfe quoted in Clark 2011, 53). However, these vast networks of signifying possibilities have often been neglected in any discussions of language. Anne Bell says, “The view of language is deeply embedded in the conceptual framework of critical pedagogy” and as such language is always examined through a “human-centred epistemological framework” (Bell 2000, 189). This epistemological framework enables us to contemplate huge questions of being but it also sets up limits for understanding. Evernden says “if subjectivity, willing, valuation, and meaning are securely lodged in the domain of humanity, the possibility of encountering anything more than material objects in nature is nil” (quoted in Bell 2000, 188). Both Tolkien and Jackson remove these limitations. In Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, Tolkien writes “As they walked through Caras Galadhon the green ways were empty; but in the trees above them many voices were murmuring and singing” (Tolkien [1954] 1999, 487). There is no hint that these voices are less important or should not be listened to but more that there is a network filled with different communication systems. This network of different communication systems and possibilities and potential for change is one of the key points of engagement with audiences.

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It could be assumed that the concerns raised in these stories would fade with the ending of each story. This should be what happens if these stories are merely hours of escapist fantasy. However, it appears that the engagement that develops through these stories is far more enduring. There is something about these stories that develops long lasting connections. Readers and viewers connect with the complex communication networks that are in play within these stories and the techniques used in the telling of these stories demonstrate that narrative shifts can cause shifts in understanding. Imagination and storytelling have a role to play in the creation of an “ethics of Nature” and an “ethics of understanding”. People are becoming aware that humans are not the only species with a story to tell. An example of this awareness is in the real life visits to “Middle-Earth” in New Zealand. Tourists flock to New Zealand not in the expectation of seeing Hobbits (although there may be many who secretly hope for this) but rather to experience the setting as narrative. The setting in these stories can no longer be seen as merely the place where the story was enacted but it becomes engrained within the narrative structure. It is the connection with place that is drawing people in. The 100% Pure New Zealand Tourism webpage encourages the connection between place and story with the catch-phrase: “Experience the Trilogy” and “Take a Journey Through Middle Earth” (100% Pure New Zealand 2013, n.p. ). The site entices visitors with the story, “Take a look at Bag End, where Frodo and Bilbo’s adventures began. Get lost among the hobbit holes and visit the Green Dragon Inn, the mill and the Party Tree. Listen to spellbinding tales of how Hobbiton came to be” (100% Pure New Zealand 2013, n.p.). The majesty of the setting may be a major contributor to people wanting to go to these places but it may also be more than this. It may be a longing for connection and to act out intersubjectivity in everyday life. The experience of reading the novels and or seeing the movie leads to a desire for interaction and these visitors “are not external to the economy, or ecosystem they visit, but part of it” (Kerridge 2000, 267). The stories have created new potentials for meanings and the physical sites give the space to act out these possibilities.

Avatar As already mentioned, Avatar is the most successful movie box office hit of all time. It could be argued that Avatar is not a conventional fantasy but rather speculative fiction or science fiction because of its use of technology and the fact that the hero does not return “home”. However, it does fit into the definition I set up earlier for environmental epic:

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“environment as legitimate agent”. The story revolves around Jake Sully, a marine from the 22nd century who has been become a paraplegic in battle. Jake is given a new mission that involves going to a far away moon called Pandora and convincing the Na’vi (the indigenous inhabitants) to move from their home. In order to complete this task, Jake is to take the shape and ability of the Na’vi. He achieves this new shape and form through the use of the latest “Avatar” technology. If Jake is successful, he will be “given” new legs and fit into “normal” human society again. Jake’s desire for acceptance and to be seen as “normal” again is what motivates him to take on the expedition. The motivation for the company behind the expedition is the huge profits to be made from the fuel resource of “unobtanium”. This fuel source is found to be underneath the Na’vi’s ancestral tree and the tree will need to be destroyed. The corporation is backed by military force and this military force is not scared to use its power to attain its goals. As a number of critics have highlighted, the story is not an overly “new one” and certainly fits the structure of many an epic Hollywood blockbuster (Dances with Wolves 1990, Pocohontas 1995, and The Last Samurai 2003 are the ones most often mentioned by critics) with an unwilling hero being forced into action for the good of those around him. Annalee Newitz finds the movie “a fantasy about race told from the point of view of white people” (quoted in Grabiner 2012, 158). Newitz believes the only perspective in this story is the white male one and David Brooks in his New York Times opinion piece called it another “white messiah movie” (2010, n.p.). However, once again, this voice may be heard as the loudest because the conventional narrative reading model is followed. In this conventional reading, character, plot and theme are played out against a backdrop or setting. Brooks makes this conventional reading clear when he writes, “It’s just escapism, obviously, but benevolent romanticism can be just as condescending as the malevolent kind—even when you surround it with pop-up ferns and floating mountains (Brooks 2010, n.p.). This complaint is very similar to the one used earlier against Tolkien, a past romantic notion of hero and saviour set in an appealing but long-lost environment. There is the implication that the environment in which these stories are set is outdated and has no place in a contemporary society. These readings view the environment as something that is added as an afterthought and is only there to get the “real” white hierarchal message across. However, if Lawrence Buell’s four ways to move beyond a human perspective in story are applied to a reading of Avatar there may be other voices that begin to be heard as well. The white male voice remains the

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most dominant only if conventional rules for reading are followed. All four of Buell’s strategies for dismantling this dominant reading can be seen in operation in Avatar. The nonhuman environment is not only a backdrop in Avatar but has its own history. The audience learns in detail the history of Pandora. This is similar to the way in which Treebeard relayed the history of the Ents in The Lord of the Rings. The human interest is certainly not the only interest and humans’ accountability to the environment is part of the text’s ethical orientation. The Na’vi are not presented as objects of desire or only as alien beauties. Grabiner, in writing about the females in the movie, finds the Na’vi are portrayed as whole beings, shot in a manner that underscores their being-ness rather than the commonly fetishized point of view that tends to fragment, or crop women’s bodies to accentuate their parts in an attempt to eroticize them. (Grabiner 2012, 171)

The environment is seen as process rather than a constant or a given. And as is the case with The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, these strategies are woven into the narrative as well as the actual structure and transference of the story. In a 2010 interview in The New York Times titled “Avatar director James Cameron emphasises environmental message,” Cameron makes it clear that he sees his movie as one with a strong connection with the environment. He says, “I wanted to have these messages of opening our eyes and changing our perceptions” and he goes on to say Avatar “asks us all to be warriors for the earth” (quoted in Cieply 2010, n.p.). This aim of shifting perception fits in ideally with the aims of ecological fiction. However, there have been critics who have said that the movie does not go far enough in its message of environmental concern and it merely highlights a problem of destruction but offers no alternative or strong political message. For example, one reviewer in The Sydney Morning Herald writes, “If Cameron were more prepared to challenge our expectations, Avatar might have been what he intended. Instead, it's a beautiful folly, a technical wonder that represents a failure of nerve” (Byrnes 2009, n.p). Byrnes believes Cameron falls back onto cliché sentiments instead of taking his ideas into new territory and his movie is beautiful to look at but lacking in any message. Byrnes wants Cameron to be more didactic and direct in his message. However, as stated earlier, ecological texts often fall into the trap of being seen as too didactic and this leads to a patronising tone that can cause a disconnect with audiences, especially younger audiences.

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I would suggest that one area where Cameron does go into new territory is in his portrayal and acceptance of technology for sharing his story. Martin Heidegger in The Question Concerning Technology highlighted how technology cannot be dismissed in discussions of meaning-making because technology brings about “ways of revealing” (2002, 21). William Lovitt takes this Heideggerian notion further and finds that technology enables a “challenging revealing” that contends “with everything that is” (quoted in Heidegger 2002, xxiv). These two statements highlight the importance of including technology in any discussion of meaning formation and meaning transferral. The technology used to bring Avatar’s story to its viewers becomes part of the actual story’s meaning. Some critics have found this use of technology problematic. Chris Klassen takes issue with the fact that Avatar uses technology to represent Nature because he believes Cameron presents a version of Nature that is not “real”: Avatar does not actually represent a ‘natural world’ as such, but rather it refracts nature, providing an optical illusion of a spiritually embedded nature. This fantasy is hyperreal and thus leads viewers to an engagement with a nature that is both ‘unnatural’ (that is, constructed by human technology) and ‘better than’ or ‘more than’ the environment we currently inhabit. (2012, 74)

Klassen implies that representing Nature in this way leads to people being disappointed with the environment which surrounds them in their everyday lives. As already mentioned, in much writing about the environment, there is a tendency to separate all material into two distinct fields: the technological and the natural. Klassen also makes this separation and finds that Nature becomes unnatural when it is constructed by technology. However, this suggests that Nature has a pure version, unspoilt by humans or technology. But in doing this, Nature is always seen as belonging to the past and not part of the contemporary technological world. Mary Tiles found that when people write about Nature in fiction there is usually a clash of values between enthusiasts viewing technological development as an essential indicator of human progress and detractors who have seen technology as a vehicle of domination over both the natural environment and large sectors of humanity. When the term ‘technology’ and ‘environment’ are juxtaposed in such contexts there is a tendency to assume that the discussion to follow will be framed in terms of the divide between nature and Man. Technology is seen as the material expression of

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This approach is far too simplistic because as Raymond Williams reminded us in The Country and the City Nature is a very difficult word to define and its representation is often “an idealisation, based on a temporary situation and on a deep desire for stability, served to cover and evade the actual and bitter contradiction of the time” (Williams 1973, 45). Williams’ comment highlights that it is often easier to keep representing things as they have always been represented rather than altering or evoking change. It may be easier and more conventional to keep writing about Nature as though it is separate from human connection and technology but this gives the illusion that humans and their environments are “independently constituted and stand in an external relationship” (Tiles 2009, 236). This is not the case because humans, nonhumans, and the environment are not in an external relationship with each other, but are all interconnected. James Cameron’s choice and implementation of medium to relay this story has a huge impact upon its acceptance and connection with audiences, especially younger audiences. Cameron’s use of technology to impart the ethical orientation of the text dismantles preconceived notions of separation between humans and Nature. Ellen Grabiner says Avatar “brings into focus the relationship between humans and their technology, between humans and their planet and each other” (2012, 2). She goes further and states, Avatar melds together the seer and the seen, illuminating an alternative visual paradigm. What makes this an even more exciting adventure is that the film ends up being performative. The narrative, the technology used to create the film, and the moviegoer experience are all three interlaced; the meaning is imparted in the form that the film takes. (Grabiner 2012, 2)

This melding of form and narrative is one of Avatar’s greatest points of difference. It has crossed boundaries of conventional storytelling and the story and the structure merge, destroying barriers in the process. When this story is read in a conventional manner it fails or is absorbed by other stronger narratives (such as the titles mentioned earlier), however, when it is seen as a process rather than as a constant it opens up alternative possibilities. The movie was mostly screened in 3-D and its technological engagement was one of the things that drew the audience into the story.

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And even though the movie was panned by many critics for the narrative, the utilisation of 3-D technology was applauded. Peter Jackson’s film adaptations of The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings are also in 3-D, however, I would suggest that the technological engagement is not on the same level as Avatar. The use of 3-D allows the audience to share the same space as the story. In other words, 3-D closes the lines of separation between screen and story and it is impossible to see setting as a mere backdrop. Jackson uses the 3-D form to create engagement with his audience by opening new spaces for different dialogues to emerge. Cameron has not only opened a new space for dialogue but has taken the viewers into that space. Manohla Dargis says, Instead of bringing you into the movie with customary tricks, with a widescreen or even Imax image filled with sweeping landscapes and big action, he uses 3-D seemingly to close the space between the audience and the screen. He brings the movie to you. (Dargis 2009, n.p.)

The setting is not separate from the narrative but becomes engrained in the story experience. This process also brings back a renewed sense of wonder to the storytelling process. Cameron says, “Avatar comes from a childhood sense of wonder about science fiction and imagining other worlds” (Gross 2010, n.p.). As discussed earlier Rachel Carson found that one of the greatest outcomes of stories is their ability to “help your child to wonder” (Carson 1956, 28). The experience of Avatar brings this wonder back to the audience, whatever age they may be. It may appear to be a contradiction that Cameron uses technology to tell his story and yet his story condemns technology as an agent of reckless power. However, as we saw in Tolkien’s work, it is a particular type of technology that is set up in an extremely negative manner. In Avatar, it is technology that is imposed upon the environment by the military and huge corporations. This is not a reflection on technology itself but more on the way it is used. Mary Tiles finds that there has been close “interconnectedness, both historically and in contemporary society, between the military drive for technological innovation and large private corporations (the bureaucracies of the military-industrial complex)” (Tiles 2009, 238). This relationship has often led to the local environment and those who inhabit this environment being neglected and eventually eliminated. Avatar exposes this neglect and also offers alternatives. Present in the story is the possibility for technology to be used in a positive manner. The military in this movie may use their technology in a

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way to destroy the environment but Jake, the scientists, and the Na’vi use technology to work with the environment. They understand the context in which the technology is to be used and do not see one as necessarily separate from, or working against, the other. Richard Li-Hua argues that any modern definition of technology “emphasizes the coherence of technology and knowledge, and points out that technology transfer is not achievable without knowledge transfer as knowledge is a key to controlling technology as a whole” (Li-Hua 2009, 19). Jake, the scientists and the Na’vi all work together sharing their technological knowledge and therefore eliminating the powerlessness that a lack of this knowledge can present. One of the major flaws that arises in any contemporary story that sets up technology and Nature on opposing sides is the fact that both of these exist in the same everyday space. This setting up of binaries has also led to a problem of alienation for younger readers as their lives are very much woven around technology and to set technology up as the villain also sets younger people up as the villain. It is difficult for younger people to feel a connection with an idea if they are portrayed as the “villains”. Don Tapcott says that for “the first time, children are more knowledgeable than their parents about an innovation central to society” (quoted in Falconer 2008, 35). This expertise in the use of technology by younger people does not have to cause separation between generations but rather it can become one of the reasons “that the relationship between the young and old is becoming a dialogue, rather than a lesson” (Falconer 2008, 35). Avatar uses technology to show what is possible in story-telling. Technology can be represented as not only giving a sense of agency to the viewer and or reader but also its incorporation into the story takes the focus away from a totally human world. Grabiner suggests, following on from Judith Butler’s idea of decentring, that “it is not until we are decentred, in some way unable to grasp on to our own solid identity, that we are able to recognize the “other” (2012, 161). Jake becomes decentred and through this decentring comes to recognise the other. It is not only Jake who goes through this transformation but also all the viewers of the movie. Alternative realities mingle with “reality” causing a decentring of conventional perspective and understanding. This decentring may cause a sense of unbalance for a time but it also opens the way to find, to reuse Rachel Falconer’s term, “new ways of living in the present” (2008, 189).

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Conclusion In this chapter I have argued that fantasy as a form, and more specifically, epic environmental fantasies, have the potential to push through conventional boundaries of separation that exist between reader and story. I have revealed how these works put into practice Buell’s four key ways to move towards a more ecological narrative. The stories discussed not only decentre the human perspective but they also move the boundaries within the narrative structures allowing subjectivity to become intersubjectivity. These stories also reveal the complex and ever-changing interconnectedness between all species. The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings achieve this outcome without becoming overtly didactic or patronising in tone. Avatar removes the physical and spatial boundaries between the story and the audience. These stories do not speak “for” the environment but rather they become the platforms to hear the stories from the environment itself. Neil Evernden describes Homo Sapiens as the “natural alien”- the creature without a proper habitat and because of this humans often fear those species that appear to have this connection and sense of place. While all of these stories highlight the sense of homelessness that many humans feel they also reveal the potential for connecting with others and these stories work towards a removing of fear. Whether it is the Na’vi in Avatar, or the Hobbits, grey wizards, elves, dwarfs or the Ents in Lord of the Rings, these stories entice the readers to understand “our” sense of place is not the only legitimate sense of place. All species have the desire for a home or to use Buell’s term “place-sense” (Buell in Lodge and Wood 2008, 674). Cary Wolfe finds that posthumanism is the process of “engaging directly with the problem of anthropocentrism and speciesism and how practices of thinking and reading must change in light of their critique” (2009, xixd). I would suggest that this upending of traditional frameworks of reading and understanding is what occurs in The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and Avatar. Ruth Blair, in writing about Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, found that there are some quest stories that offer up different perspectives from the conventional single-spined stories (Blair 1996, 169). I am not suggesting that these writers and directors are working from the same framework as Indigenous authors but I do think they are pushing the conventional quest boundaries. All of the stories in this chapter are not single-spined stories. At the beginning of the chapter I set out how the environment is one of contemporary society’s major concerns. The greatest strength of these

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environmental epics is that they become actual embodiments of potentialities and difference. Audiences, especially younger viewers, yearn for embodiments of change. These popular and much-loved stories provide not only alternative meanings but frameworks for making alternative meaning possible and, perhaps, more importantly, they reveal the power of stories to shift boundaries of understanding.

Works Cited Applebaum, Noga. 2010. Representations of Technology in Science Fiction for Young People. New York: Routledge. Atwood, Margaret. 2012. “Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, 50 Years On.” The Guardian, December 7. Avatar, directed by James Cameron (2009; Los Angeles, CA: Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2009), DVD. “Avatar sequel delayed.” 2012. BreakingNews.Ie. January 12. Last modified April 10. http://search.proquest.com/docview/915681764?accountid=13380. Bell, Anne. 2000. “Beyond Human, beyond words: Anthropocentrism, critical pedagogy and the postructuralist turn.” Canadian Journal of Education 25.2: 188-203. Blair, Ruth. 1996. “Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony in the Context of a Course Entitled ‘Language, Literature, and Environment.’” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 3.2: 169. Blake, William. (1789-1794) 2001. Songs of Experience. Online: Global Language Resources, Inc. http://ebooks.gutenberg.us/DjVu_Collection/DJEDS/BLAKE/SONGS/ Download.pdf. Bloom, Harold. 2011. The Hobbit. New York: Chelsea House. Bradford, Clare, Kerry Mallan, John Stephens and Robyn McCallum. 2008. New World Orders in Contemporary Children’s Literature. Houndsmill: Palgrave. Bradford, Clare and Kerry Mallan. 2011. Contemporary Children’s Literature and Film; Engaging with Theory. Hampshire: Palgrave. Brooks, David. 2010. “The Messiah Complex.” New York Times, January 7. Accessed February 2013. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/08/opinion/08brooks.html. Buell, Lawrence. 2009. The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination. Oxford: WileyBlackwell.

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Byrnes, Paul. 2009. “Bambi meets Alien in a riot of colour in James Cameron's long awaited new movie”. Sydney Morning Herald, December 16 Accessed Jan. 9 2013. http://www.smh.com.au/news/entertainment/film/filmreviews/avatar/2009/12/16/1260639220329.html?page=2. Carson, Rachel. 1956. “Help Your Child to Wonder.” Woman’s Home Companion Magazine, July. 24-30 —. 1962. The Silent Spring. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Cherry, Lynn. 1990. The Great Kapok Tree. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Cieply, Michael. 2010. “Avatar Director James Cameron emphasises environmental message.” New York Times, February 23. http://carpetbagger.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/23/avatar-directoremphasizes-environmental-message/. Clark, Timothy. 2011. The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Coupe, Laurence. 2000. The Green Studies Reader: From Romanticism to Ecocriticism. London: Routledge. Curry, Alice. 2013. Environmental Crisis in Young Adult Fiction: A Poetics of Earth. Houndsmill: Palgrave, Macmillan. Cutter-Mackenzie, Amy, Philip G. Payne and Alan Reid, eds. 2011. Experiencing Environment and Place Through Children’s Literature. London: Routledge. Dickens, Charles. (1854) 1966. Hard Times. Reprint, New York: W.W.Norton. Dargis, Manohla. 2009. “A New Eden, Both Cosmic and Cinematic.” New York Times. December 17 Accessed January 8 2013.. http://movies.nytimes.com/2009/12/18/movies/18avatar.html?pagewan ted=all&_r=0. Dr Seuss. 1971. The Lorax. New York: Random House. Evernden, Neil. 1993. The Natural Alien: Humankind and Environment. Toronto, University of Toronto Press. Falconer, Rachel. 2008. Crossover Fiction and Cross-Reading in the UK. Hoboken, New Jersey: Taylor and Francis. Fien, John, David Yencker and Helen Sykes. 2002. Young People and the Environment—An Asia-Pacific Perspective. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic. Fiske, John. 2006. “Understanding Popular Culture.” In Popular Culture Theory and Methodology, edited by Harold E Hinds Jr., Marilyn F. Motz, and Angela M.S. Nelson, 118—126. Madison, Wisconsin: Popular Press.

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Fowkes, Katherine. 2010. The Fantasy Film. Chichester, UK: WileyBlackwell. Gelder, Ken. 2004. Popular Fiction: The Logics and practices of a Literary Field. London: Routledge. Giroux, Henry, A. 2000. Stealing innocence: Youth, Coporate Power and The Politics of Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Glotfelty, Cheryl, and Harold Fromm.. 1996. The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Athens: Georgio Press. Grabiner, Ellen. 2012. I See You: The Shifting Paradigms of James Cameron’s Avatar. Jefferson: McFarlands & Company. Gross, Terry. 2010. “James Cameron: Pushing the Limits of Imagination.” NPR, February 18 Accessed March 15, 2013. http://www.npr.org/2010/02/18/123810319/james-cameron-pushingthe-limits-of-imagination. Guin, Ursula. Le. 1989. Languages of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction. New York: HarperCollins. Heidegger, Martin. 2002. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Translated by William Lovitt. New York: Harper & RowHolland, Nancy J. 2002. “Genre Fiction and the Origin of the Work of Art.” Philosophy and Literature 26.1: 216-223. Huggan, Graham and Tiffin Huggan. 2009. Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment. New York: Routledge. Kerridge, Richard. 2000. Green Studies Reader: Romanticism to Eco Criticism. London: Routledge. Klassen, Chris. 2012. “Avatar, Dark Green Religion, and the Technological Construction of Nature.” Cultural Studies Review 18.2: 74—88. Li-Hua, Richard. 2009. “Definitions of Technology.” In A Companion to the Philosophy of Technology, edited by Olsen, Jan Kyrre Berg; Hendricks, Vincent F.; and Stig Andur. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell , 18—22 Lodge, David and Nigel Wood. 2008. Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader. Harlow: Pearson Education. Lodge, Guy. 2011. “With ‘The Hobbit’ Looming, We Revisit the RecordTying Oscar haul for ‘Return of the King.’” Hitfix, December 21. Accessed 24 January 2013. http://www.hitfix.com/blogs/in-contention/ posts/with-the-hobbit-looming-over-2012-we-revisit-the-record-tyingoscar-haul-for-the-return-of-the-king. Mathews, Richard. 2012. Fantasy: The Liberation of Imagination. Hoboken, New Jersey, Taylor and Francis.

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Mathijs, Ernest. 2006. The Lord of the Rings: Popular Culture in Global Context. London: Wallflower Press. Mathijs, Ernest and Pomerance, Murray. 2006. Contemporary Cinema Volume 3: From Hobbits to Hollywood: Essays on Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Morgan, Alun. 2010. “The Lord of the Rings – a mythos applicable in unsustainable times?” Environmental Education Research 16. 3-4: 295-310. 100% Pure New Zealand. . 2013. “Kia Ora Welcome to New Zealand.” Accessed 10 May. http://www.newzealand.com. Olsen, Jan Kyrre Berg, Vincent F Hendricks, and Stig Arthur Pedersen. 2009. A Companion to the Philosophy of Technology. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell. Partridge, Emma. 2008. “From Ambivalence to Activism: Young People’s Environmental Views and Actions.” Youth Studies Australia 27.2: 1825. Payne, Michael and Jessica Rae Barbera,. 2010. A Dictionary of Cultural and Critical Theory. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell. Porfilio, Bradley and Paul Carr. 2008. “Youth Culture and the Mass Media: The Implications of Media (il)literacy.” Academic Exchange Quarterly 124: 1-4. Plumwood, Val. 2008. “Philosophy and the Natural World,” ABC Radio,, March 15 Accessed May 15 2012.. http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/philosopherszone/philos ophy-and-the-natural-world---val-plumwood/3291526. Rueckert, William. 1978. “Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism.” Iowa Review 9.1: 71-86. Soper, Kate. 1995. What is Nature? Culture, Politics and the Nonhuman. Mass., USA: Blackwell. Shippey, Tom. 1982. The Road to Middle-Earth. London: Allen & Unwin. Stephens, John. 2006. “From Eden to Suburbia: Perspectives on the Natural World in Children’s Literature,” Papers: explorations into Children’s Literature 19.1: 40-50. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, directed by Peter Jackson (2001; Los Angeles, CA: New Line Cinema, 2001), DVD. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, directed by Peter Jackson (2002; Los Angeles, CA: New Line Cinema, 2002,) DVD. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, directed by Peter Jackson (2003, Los Angeles, CA: New Line Cinema, 2003), DVD. The Hobbit, directed by Peter Jackson (2012; Los Angeles, CA: New Line Cinema, 2012), DVD.

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Tiles, Mary. 2009. “Technology and Environment.” In A Companion to the Philosophy of Technology, edited by Olsen, Jan Kyrre Berg; Hendricks, Vincent F.; and Stig Andur. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 235—247 Tolkien, J. R. R. (1954) 1999. The Fellowship of the Ring. Reprint, London: HaperCollins. . (1964) 2001. Tree and Leaf: The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth. Reprint, London, HarperCollins. . (1954) 2002, The Two Towers. Reprint, London: HarperCollins. . (1955). 2007, The Return of the King. Reprint,London: HarperCollins __. (1937) 1995, The Hobbit: or there and back again. Reprint, London: HarperCollins. Tuan, Yi-Fu. 1974. Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes and Values. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Pentice-Hall. Williams, Raymond. 1973. The Country and The City. New York: Oxford University Press. —. 1983. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. London: Fontana. Winton, Tim. 1997. Blueback: A Fable for all Ages. Sydney, Macmillan. Wolfe, C. 2009. What is Posthumanism? Minnesota: Minnesota Press.

CHAPTER SEVEN TELEVISION, ENTERTAINMENT AND EDUCATION: ISSUES OF SEXUALITY IN GLEE SHARYN PEARCE

When Glee is about kids questing for identity, it’s often very, very good. (Van der Werff, 2010)

The evidence clearly shows that young people can be “reached” via popular culture. Commentators as diverse as Henry Giroux (1989; 1994; 1997; 2002), David Buckingham (2004), Roger Simon (1989), Cameron McCarthy (1998; 1999), Anne Haas Dyson (2002) and Peter McLaren (1994), among many others, have contributed to the understanding of how popular cultural texts shape young people’s identities, and how they exist as pedagogical sites where youth learn about the world. The respected ethnographer and cultural theorist Paul Willis, for example, argued twenty years ago that popular culture is a more significant, penetrating pedagogical force in young people’s lives than schooling: The field of education…will be further marginalised in most young people’s experience by common culture. In so far as educational practitioners are still predicated on traditional liberal humanist lines and on the assumed superiority of high art, they will become almost totally irrelevant to the real energies and interests of most young people and have no part in their identity formation. Common culture will, increasingly, undertake, in its own ways, the roles that education has vacated. (Willis 1990, 147)

Nadine Dolby has also addressed the reasons as to why educators should pay particular attention to popular culture as a cultural practice that has its own power to create social change, “to alter social conditions and the very foundations of people’s lives” (Dolby 2003, 259). Dolby claims that popular culture is not simply fluff that can be dismissed as irrelevant

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and insignificant: on the contrary, “it has the capacity to intervene in the most critical issues and to shape public opinion” (Dolby 2003, 259). What remains clear from this engaging and ongoing scholarly debate is that the popular is a site where youth are invested, where things happen, where identities are worked out, performed and negotiated, and where new futures are written, for better or for worse. It is generally accepted also that from the beginning of the twentieth century the concept of adolescence has been entangled with concerns about and attempts to manage or at least regulate the sexuality of youth (Moran 2000; Kidd 2004). Now while school programs have had little impact upon adolescent sexuality, and researchers have found virtually no evidence that sex education causes students to change their behaviour in one direction or another (Moran 2000, 219), mainstream entertainment designed to appeal to mainstream audiences is more likely to be a more effective conduit for youth than the classroom experience. After all, as Henry Giroux has observed, film is a compelling mode of public pedagogy, a visual technology which functions as a powerful teaching machine that intentionally tries to influence the production of meaning, subject positions, identities and experience. Because a television series offers a deeper pedagogical register for producing particular narratives, subject positions and ideologies than, for example, a popular song, it carries considerable pedagogical weight. According to Giroux, a film or a television series can offer a uniquely powerful and persuasive mobilisation of shared and public space, using spectatorial pleasure and symbolic meaning to shape young people’s identities outside of school (Giroux 2002, 6). Nonetheless researchers in sexuality education still tend to focus on classroom sex education pedagogies, despite the fact that young people learn about sexuality from a range of sources, including of course the entertainment media. Alan McKee argues that popular culture is a particularly important site which young people actively seek out because it gives them the kind of information they want, in ways that seem relevant to them, and this is clearly not often the case for formal teaching. Indeed, when adolescents are asked where they get their information about sexuality, a range of sources is mentionedíņformal schooling certainly, but also friends, family and the entertainment media (McKee 2012). McKee’s work reinforces Louisa Allen’s discovery, following extensive interviews with young people, that they tended to distinguish between two quite distinct forms of sexual health information, which she named as the

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“official” and the “erotic” (Allen 2005). While schools provide the former—that is, “official” information about sexual health including topics such as puberty and reproduction—they provide little of the “erotic” information that young people really want, about relationships, emotional intimacy, and the cultivation of sexual pleasure for both partners, for example. It is quite apparent to sexuality researchers such as McKee and Allen that young people switch somewhat effortlessly between these two quite separate areas, with formal sources of information, such as schools, being used for biological or “technical” information (in young people’s terms, about “puberty, procreation and penetration” (Sorenson and Brown 2007, 34)), and informal sources, such as friends and the internet, for erotic information (McKee 2012, 501-2). A further separation between formal and informal sexuality education relates to attitudes towards sexuality: while surveys show that the vast majority of young people find sexual experimentation attractive, exciting and pleasurable, sex education classes in schools frequently present it as a potentially dangerous enterprise which could lead to a sexually transmitted disease or an unwanted teen pregnancy (McKee 2012, 503). In this sense, then, formal sex education does not engage with students and it seems irrelevant to them as it refutes their own sexual experiences. Clearly young people do need to learn about sexuality, and they should have access to knowledge about safe sex practices, contraceptive advice, and how to ensure that sex is consensual, and so on. But this information is extremely unlikely to be provided in a classroom setting in Britain, Australia or the United States, for example, where open discussion of sexuality is inhibited by a range of social and cultural factors, and it is difficult to talk in a public forum to young people about their sexual development, to address them as sexual beings. McKee and others have also noted that while some studies have claimed that there is a connection between young people being exposed to sexual content in popular cultural outlets such as the media and becoming sexually active, other research suggests the reverse—that young people who have initiated their sex lives (or are about to) may be attracted to sexual content in the media because it is an important part of their emerging identity (McKee 2012, 505; Rich 2008, 330; Hawk et al. 2006, 352). This youth-centred approach is attractive as it presents young people as empowered individuals who actively seek out information to make personal decisions about their sexual identities. It is therefore abundantly clear that while formal schooling focuses on technical information with a negative slant, it is not sought after or valued by young people who instead

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seek out informal information about sexuality because it gives them the sort of information that they need and desire. It is equally apparent that popular culture and the entertainment industry in fact serve a de facto educational role for young people seeking information about their sexuality (McKee 2007). In this chapter I am concurring with Claudia Nelson and Michelle Martin’s argument that sex education is not a stable identity, but something which responds quickly to national crises or to changes in social ethos. It reflects evolving ideas about gender, race, social class, and childhood, as well as about sexuality. (Nelson and Martin 2004, 2)

Indeed, since I first started working in this area over a decade ago (when I analysed the first American Pie movie, arguing that the text was instrumental in giving information to young men about new-age masculinity, the treatment of girls, and female desire, all within the genre of gross-out comedy (Pearce 2003), I’ve become aware of just how fast informal sexuality education via popular cultural media is changing and evolving. I’m also mindful of Glyn Davis and Kay Dickinson’s argument that most teen texts are created to educate and inform while entertaining; to set certain agendas in this delicate time just prior to the onset of a more prominent citizenship; and/or to raise crucial issues (of adult choosing) in a ‘responsible manner’ that is entirely hegemonically negotiated. (Davis and Dickinson 2004, 3)

I agreed with this comment in an article about the last instalment of the American Pie franchise, American Wedding, where I argued that the series no longer reinforced subversive messages nor celebrated insubordinate performances of gender in its exploration of contemporary teen identity, but instead steered teens towards sexual and cultural heterodoxy and emphasised the pleasure and profit of normal desire. That is, in my opinion, the film endorsed heteronormative discourses such as marriage, with family and responsibility charting its celluloid terrain, in keeping with the more conservative social climate of the time (Pearce 2006). However it is important to note at this point that I do not see Glee as reinforcing hegemonic ideas, and it most certainly tests the boundaries of mainstream U.S. television. In the manner of the first American Pie, so many years ago now, it manages to critique gender dynamics and teen identity, educating while it entertains. But instead of using gross-out

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comedy to deliver (and sugar-coat) the serious messages, it uses wonderfully sharp, spectacular musical numbers and comedy, incorporating often absurdly funny story-lines and deadpan one-liners in its educative push.

Glee: Mixing Entertainment and Education Glee has been a phenomenally successful television show which is especially popular with teens, but it also engages viewers, often referred to as “Gleeks,” across the entire spectrum (it was originally designed as a show for all the family). Based in the fictional small town of Lima, Ohio, it deals with a group of talented misfits (spoilt princess Rachel; sweet jock Finn; flamboyant Kurt, the only openly gay student at McKinley High School; bad boy Puck; wheelchair bound Artie, and so on), who find a place for themselves in the school Glee Club, run by the Spanish teacher Will Schuester. The show started in 2009, and has run for four seasons so far. (Several new students were introduced in series four, when some of the regulars graduated, but the original cast still seemed to be the viewers’ favourites. For this reason, and also in the interests of economy, discussion of the show is limited in this chapter to the first three seasons). As befits its title, Glee is consistently optimistic, inspirational and uplifting (after all, the feel-good theme song is the catchy “Don’t Stop Believin’”). It stresses themes of difference, tolerance and acceptance, and valourises the worth of all individuals, as well as the need to be true to yourself, to accept yourself for what you are (or, as the chief villain, the cheerleading coach of the Cheerios, Sue Sylvester, puts it, Glee Club members are always “singing how awesome it is to be alive or ugly or something”) (“Never Been Kissed,” season 2, episode 6). Glee preaches a message of tolerance; as one critic puts it, “this show takes its jabs at everyone but it always has a wink and a hug and lots of love behind it” (Hankinson 2009, n.p.). Glee is partly a satirical dramedy about the cut-throat environment of high school, about handling the importance of being “cool” and popular, about coping with loneliness, angst and peer group pressure, and as such it is full of pithy observations about teen life. On the other hand, it is also partly a camp melodrama with over-the-top soap opera twists. Because of this, some critics have found it a show with a something of an identity crisis. As Eric Goldman comments: Glee continues to work because it has its cake and eats it too. It’s an over the top, overly cheerful musical – but also a biting comedy that always

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winks at the audience and acknowledges how cheesy musical comedy can be, even while also proving how fun it is. (Goldman 2010, n.p.)

At its best, and admittedly even the most partisan observer would agree that the show is often patchy, it is “balanced between heart and bite” (Futterman 2010 n.p.). It contains strong humour, warm character moments, and catchy tailored musical performances carrying emotional heft, when, heightened by the music, characters come to certain key realisations about themselves, their relationships, and the world about them. While the New Directions team may not be as technically skilled as some of the other high school groups they compete against, they are enthusiastic underdogs who perform in a heart-soaring way: they are “losers” with delusions of grandeur as distinct from other groups who often come across as soulless automatons. Furthermore, it is very evident from the outset that there is a serious motivation behind the hit show. This is perhaps best explained by one of the writers, Ryan Murphy, who was talking about an episode entitled “Wheels” (season 1, episode 9), in which Kurt Hummel’s father Burt complains to the school principal that his son is being discriminated against because he is not allowed to sing “Defying Gravity,” a song usually sung by a woman. According to Murphy, As we go forward, this episode has reverberations for the whole season. [Glee] is a comedy first and foremost. But we see the obligation to go deeper. This isn’t just a genre show to me. It’s about the desperate need for a place in the world and how we all fit in and how hard it is for some people to get by.

Murphy continued: that’s in a nutshell what this show is about: someone being told that they can’t do something because of what the perception of them is as opposed to what their real ability is. (Fernandez 2009a, n.p.)

Chris Colfer, who plays Kurt, and whose experience in his high school days inspired this particular episode, also noted: “I think this message, the story behind the song about defying limits and borders placed by others is really important” (Fernandez 2009b, n.p.). Behind the upbeat and funny stories, then, are many thoughtful messages for young people, always conveyed in an upbeat fashion, no matter how dark or huge some of the issues being explored may be. And in this chapter I am arguing in particular that Glee acts as an entertainment site for young people motivated to seek out information about sex and sexuality.

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Glee, Youth and Didacticism As Toby Miller notes in Global Hollywood, the media is a “twentieth century cultural addition…that sits aside such traditional topics as territory, language, history and schooling” (Miller 2001, 15), and it is “an instrument of instruction and response that varies with place, time, genre and audience” (Miller 2001, 177). Some experts, however, warn of the need to be careful about overt didacticism directed at the citizen/consumer; for example, researchers like Buckingham and Bragg stress the need to avoid being preachy to young people who often resist messages (Buckingham and Bragg 2004), choosing instead to consume entertaining stories which are more successful in engaging their interest. Indeed, Buckingham and Bragg found that media texts which had the most impact on young people were those which did not offer a definitive answer on questions about sexual conduct, but rather set up ethical questions which young people could discuss or think for themselves (Buckingham and Bragg 2004). It seems clear that entertainment must function primarily as good entertainment, and only then can it effectively communicate information about sexuality. In the main, Glee functions in this fashion: it manages to entertain while getting its important life lessons across, although at times it can also be too message-laden, and heavily themefocused, not allowing young people a great deal of latitude to think for themselves. An example of overt didacticism is “Laryngitis,” (season 1, episode 18). In this episode, Rachel is taken by Finn to meet a paraplegic footballer who is paralysed below the upper chest after injuring his spinal cord in an accident. This visit serves to remind Rachel of how insignificant her own problems are, and quite rightly prompted complaints by disability associations about the token and insensitive use of the disabled as a plot device (Franich 2010). This objection can partly be excused by the fact that the episode does show an epiphany, part of an ongoing development of Rachel’s character, which makes her less selfish and driven to achieve success, while in addition the footballer was played by a genuinely disabled actor, whereas the regular character Artie, who is restricted to a wheelchair, is played by an able-bodied actor. For one critic, this episode highlighted a trend for Glee storylines to become progressively sadder, rather than comedic. Lisa Respers France commented that the plotlines came across as lecturing and noted I still heart Glee, which is clearly one of the best shows on television right now. I just think they might want to lighten the life lessons and spread

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Another instance of manifest and mawkish proselytising is “Comeback” (season 2, episode 13), in which Will and Sue visit a paediatric cancer ward, prompting Sue to have a temporary change of heart about her evil plans to sabotage the Glee Club. Generally speaking, in the view of many critics—and viewers—Glee works best when the messages are not laid on too thickly and viewers are allowed to think for themselves (this echoes Buckingham and Bragg’s findings, of course). One such successful episode would be “Duets” (season 2, episode 4), which was praised by Amy Reiter in the Los Angeles Times: You know how, in a perfectly sung duet, the two voices ebb and flow and twist and blend and play and lift in a way that makes a wonderfully pure whole? That’s sort of what Tuesday’s episode of Glee felt like to me. The plot and the music were in perfect balance. No one was being pushed out of character by some tacked-on theme, facing the trauma of a dying parent, or tackling deep issues about the presence of a deity... Every member of the choir was given a storyline and a voice. (Reiter 2010, n.p.)

Similarly “The Power of Madonna” (season 1, episode 15) delivers a message of female empowerment with a light and comic touch, prompting Bobby Hankinson in the Houston Chronicle to declare: This is Glee at its very, very best. The story was light and moved briskly with minimal ham-fisted melodrama. The performances were not only great on their own, but most of them greatly improved on the source material. And, most importantly, the whole thing was just overwhelmingly fun. (Hankinson 2010a, n.p.)

Finally Todd Van der Werff, writing for The Onion, praised “Silly Love Songs” (season 2, episode 12), calling it a fine example of the show at what’s very nearly its absolute best. There’s nothing too heady here, but if the show has one tone that it’s nailed almost completely consistently, it’s the feeling of teenage romance, the sense the person you’re with is the only person you’ll ever be in love with... followed almost immediately by the crippling feeling of heartbreak, of losing that person too soon. Teenage life moves fast and is filled with heightened emotions. And like most musicals, Glee works best when it embraces those two sides of its characters’ lives... The best episodes play that elation and devastation off each other. The worst episodes flounder about for some sort of emotional foothold. But when Glee just tells small,

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sweet stories about these kids and the ways they’re trying to cope with being in high school when they know they’re meant for better things, it can be terrific. Tonight was one of those episodes, and tonight’s episode was terrific. (Van der Werff 2011a, n.p.)

Some episodes prove conclusively that it is possible to deal with larger issues and not be perceived as too didactic or sermonising. In “Blame It on the Alcohol” (season 2, episode 14), Principal Figgins is worried about the prevalence of alcohol-related misdemeanours at the school, and asks the Glee Club to perform a song item based on the dangers of alcohol at the school assembly. Unfortunately, the Glee members are suffering from hangovers following a party at Rachel’s, and inadvisedly continue drinking just before they are due to go on. As a result, several of the cast vomit, bringing the production to a dramatic halt. Principal Figgins is delighted, however, as he believes that the piece is a musical comedy which has shocked the school so much that alcohol misdemeanours are dramatically reduced. This episode points to the fact that teenagers often indulge in experimental activity, and that the attitude of adults is often hypocritical as they not only behaved like that at their age but they still do so (for example, Will gets drunk with football coach Bieste and then sends a sexually suggestive phone message to Sue Sylvester instead of his love interest, the uptight school counsellor Emma Pillsbury). The episode gets a tad moralising towards the end with Will persuading the club members to sign a pledge not to drink before Nationals, but overall it is amusingly and ironically done, drawing praise from Reiter: “leave it to Glee to tackle a potentially joyless, didactic topic like teenage drinking and somehow manage to entertain and surprise while getting its important life lessons across” (Reiter 2011a).

Glee and Adolescent Sexuality So what, then, does Glee have to say about adolescent sexuality in particular, and how does it get the messages across, given that both critics and commentators agree that good and effective entertainment apparently means engrossing stories delivered with a light and hopefully comic touch? Indeed, how successful is it in conveying those important life messages in a pleasurable and engaging way to the audience? As it happens, Glee has rather a lot to say about teen sexuality, especially for a mainstream audience, and for the most part, in my opinion, it says it rather well. Its sexual sassiness is seen as early as “Showmance” (season 1, episode 2), where Glee Club members perform Salt-n-Pepa’s provocative “Push It” to a very startled, but very receptive, school assembly. And like

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all teenagers, the Glee Club members have intense if often short-lived relationships and romantic “hook-ups,” which often change bewilderingly fast. For example, Finn goes out with Quinn, the President of the Celibacy Club, but Quinn falls pregnant to his best friend Puck. Finn then goes out with Rachel, but wants to play the field a bit, and Rachel goes off with Jesse, a rival in another Glee Club. Finn realises that he really likes Rachel, but in the meantime has sex with hot cheerleader Santana, who is also a member of the Glee Club. Then when Rachel finds out, she attempts to make out with Puck, but Finn can’t forgive her for that and he goes back to Quinn before getting back to Rachel in the end (and so it goes). The adults also have equally dysfunctional relationships which consistently mirror those of the Glee Club members – for example, Will fancies Emma, who has Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, which makes her shy away from relationships, but he is married to Terri, his high school sweetheart who is now a ditsy shrew who fakes a pregnancy to keep him anchored to her. Moreover, although Emma loves Will, she gets engaged to the school football coach who jilts her, then she marries Carl, a dentist, who later manages to get the marriage annulled as it has never been consummated. Glee appears to be at pains to emphasise that relationship crises occur throughout life, but for the most part the adults are less engaging than the young people, whom the best storylines usually feature. Generally speaking, Glee shows the importance of building up to becoming a sexual being and of not approaching it lightly. The series shows how ignorance of sex leads to the wrong conclusions: for example, Finn believes that he is Quinn’s baby’s father although he has never actually had sex with her (the closest that he came to it was being with her in a hot tub, clothed, when he succumbed to premature ejaculation). Later, when Finn has a one-night stand with Santana in “The Power of Madonna” (season 1, episode 15), he is depressed because it means nothing to him and he is unable to enjoy it (happily, the moralism is diluted here by Santana’s wise-cracking, and furthermore this ill-advised coupling serves to precipitate the necessary narrative twist which leaves Finn and Rachel in yearning romantic limbo across four seasons and far too many episodes to count). Meanwhile Artie feels used when Brittany has sex with him because she wants to partner him in a duet (his voice is considerably better than hers). Both casual encounters cause heartache for those involved (and also for others who aren’t). As a rule (and the school stud, Puck, is something of an exception here, although even he is really a softie at heart), the girls are more assertive sexually. When Quinn is coerced into sex with Puck, she regrets it massively: his “trust me” was

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never going to work as a contraceptive method, and she has to cope with the fall from being the top girl in school as head of the Cheerios cheerleading squad to an outcast forced to reveal her pregnancy every day to her peers. For the most part, then, adolescent longing is treated seriously and shown in a realistic and yet often comic way, and boys and girls alike are shown coping with desire: for example, faced with apparently the only girls in the school who won’t “put out,” Finn and Sam “cool down” by imagining the football coach, the gruff Ms Bieste, in lingerie, and Tina also uses this to dampen her ardour when she’s with her boyfriend Mike (“Never Been Kissed,” season 2, episode 6). In storylines such as these Glee demonstrates that it is normal to be consumed by sex and sexual uncertainty, that it is a normal part of growing up. Undeniably, though, the biggest contribution that the series makes to sex education is the concentration upon certain characters’ embracing of their sexual identities.

Three Characters Searching for their Sexual Identity Three main story arcs and three core characters serve to focus upon how ideas about sexual desire and confusion are presented in the series. Rachel Berry, the series’ central character, is on a single-minded, applause-seeking journey towards a career as a Broadway singer. She has a magnificent voice but is tolerated more than liked by the rest of the Glee Club members because of her tendency to dominate and control, and to want to take the lead vocals in all the songs. In “Audition” (season 2, episode 1), she even goes so far as to direct a very talented rival to a crackhouse instead of the designated theatre. For the most part, Rachel is almost entirely desexualised, as the stories tend to promote her compulsive competitiveness: nevertheless in one ill-advised early attempt to attract Finn she acts out “You’re the One that I Want” from Grease, only to be told by Finn that he is really uncomfortable, that he prefers natural girls, and that she looks like “a silly clown hooker,” and “I like the way you usually dress” (“Hairography,” season 1, episode 11). The only boy to be aroused by her is the hopelessly nerdy school blogger Jacob Ben Israel who reacts to her wearing more provocative clothes in an episode entitled “Brittany/Britney” (season 2, episode 2), and is later discovered by Sue Sylvester in the school library masturbating to a video of her singing “Baby One More Time.” Jacob is similarly stimulated (like other members of the school body) when the Glee Club members perform the Spears number “Toxic” at school assembly, causing Sue to declare it a “Britney Spears sex riot” and to set off the fire alarm to stop the performance. Like the other Glee Club members, both male and female, Rachel is

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preoccupied with her looks and body image, especially so when her nose is accidentally broken by Finn in a dance routine. Her doctor recommends a nose job, and she rejects this only after Kurt persuades her that Barbra Streisand refused to succumb to pressure to alter her nose (“Born This Way,” season 2, episode 18). It is clear that Rachel and Finn are “soulmates” destined for one another, and their on/off/on/off relationship is the main narrative strand, with dedicated fans declaring Finchel to be their main motivation for watching the series. One other character who becomes an increasingly strong focus for dealing with issues of sexuality is Kurt Hummer, beautifully played by Chris Colfer. As the series progresses Kurt moves from a somewhat marginal character to a much more pivotal role. In “Acafellas” (season 1, episode 3), Kurt admits his gayness to the Glee Club members, coming out first of all to his friend Mercedes, in a manner which Colfer has described as “very respectful and very touching... very, very real and serious” (Borzillo-Vrenna 2009, n.p.). Kurt’s story is based on co-writer Ryan Murphy’s own life, and Murphy has admitted that he was determined to make Kurt’s situation ultimately accepting and joyous, unlike other scripts he had been responsible for. This is clearly seen, for example, in “Preggers” (season 1, episode 4), where Kurt admits his gayness to his father Burt, who ends up not being the stereotyped blue-collar boor that viewers have been led to expect, and says instead that he has always known his son’s sexual proclivity and loves him just the same. According to Murphy, this scene was “a great thing to be put on television” because other shows generally have gay characters as isolated and attacked, and rarely are they seen as winning and triumphing (Fernandez and Martin 2009, n.p.). Murphy also commented: The show is about making you feel good in the end. It’s about happy endings and optimism and the power of your personal journey and making you feel that the weird thing about me is the great thing about me. I’ve done other shows with gay characters, and I will say that in many of those cases, the gay characters didn’t have a happy ending. And I thought you know what? Enough.” (Fernandez and Martin 2009)

Colfer has also spoken about the scene, noting that his biggest challenge was to ensure that it felt honest, not comical, or “used as a punchline.” He commented: “I think it’s probably the first time a character’s sexuality has been respected and almost dignified in a way, and I think that’s really important, and there needs to be more of that on TV” (Milzoff 2009, n.p.).

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Kurt’s personal journey is nonetheless not at all easy. He develops a crush on Finn, and introduces his widowed father to Finn’s widowed mother, hoping to develop his own relationship. This ploy backfires when Burt develops a strong relationship with Finn, who shares his liking for football and manly pursuits. In an attempt to impress his father Kurt tries to become something he is not, by wearing flannel shirts, singing John Cougar Mellencamp songs and making out with Brittany. When Finn and his mother move in, and Finn and Kurt have to share a room together, Burt comes to Kurt’s defence when Finn shouts at Kurt “you’re always making a spectacle of yourself,” and talks about the room having “faggy furniture” (“Theatricality,” season 1, episode 20). Burt is prepared to throw him out and risk his growing relationship with Carole for Kurt’s sake, declaring that he thought that Finn was part of a new generation that saw things differently, but he was wrong. At school too, Kurt becomes a victim of bullying, and, following a subplot that starts early in season one and continues throughout the first three series, is repeatedly thrown against the lockers by the school bully, Dave Karofsky, whose homophobia conceals the fact that he is a closeted gay. Realistically, when the Glee Club girls ask their football-playing boyfriends to confront Karofsky about the bullying they refuse to do so, as they are afraid of the retaliation that will be directed towards them. On a visit to spy on his Sectional rivals at Dalton Academy, an upmarket all-boys’ school with a no tolerance for bullying policy which looks like an almost otherworldly paradise (“Never been Kissed,” season 2, episode 6), Kurt meets his future soul-mate Blaine, who is openly gay but left his previous school because of harassment, and still feels guilty for doing so. Blaine tells Kurt to refuse to be a victim, encouraging Kurt to take a confrontationist approach, and he does so, declaring to Karofsky “you can’t punch the gay out of me, just as I can’t punch the ignoramus out of you.” Karofsky then unexpectedly kisses him, and in so doing is transformed from a faceless jock into a nuanced character with a back story and hidden motives of his own. When he threatens to kill Kurt if he tells, Kurt is terrified and Burt and Carole use the money destined for their honeymoon to send him to the Dalton Academy. Following his return to McKinley High after Karofsky’s public pledge to give up bullying, Kurt is unexpectedly elected Prom Queen by his peers (“Prom Queen,” season 2, episode 20). At first he rushes away in tears, but he is persuaded by Blaine to return to accept his tiara, and his comment, “Eat your heart out, Kate Middleton!” turns a humiliation into a

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celebration. Karofsky had been elected Prom King and the two were meant to dance together, and although Kurt whispers to him to come out he is unable to do it, instead leaving Kurt alone on the dance floor. Blaine then steps in and asks him to dance, after which they are then joined by the entire school body. Colfer admitted to initial doubts about the outrageous nature of the storyline: namely about being Prom Queen, wearing a kilt and a tiara as his personal fashion statement, and finally dancing to ABBA’s “Dancing Queen,” feeling that “it might be pushing it too much,” and that it might tarnish Kurt’s “helpful and progressive” depiction, but he felt later that this was all unfounded (Riley 2011, n.p.). Finally, when Karofsky is later outed, and attempts suicide, Kurt visits him in hospital and the two are reconciled. Glee’s willingness to raise mainstream awareness of such issues as homophobia and bullying has been described by Bobby Hankinson in the Houston Chronicle as “incredibly courageous” (Hankinson 2010b, n.p.), and Kurt’s prominent positioning in providing the central emotional storyline, vis a vis the bullying and the growing relationship with Blaine, is central to this. According to Tim Stack in Entertainment Weekly, Kurt’s character has to walk that fine line between being a role model and becoming too saintly. I think the writers are navigating that tightrope quite, quite well. (Stack 2010, n.p.)

Blaine and Kurt finally profess their love for each other in season two, and Kurt, no longer sad and lonely, looks to face the future happily. He has his first kiss in “Original Song” (season 2, episode 16), prompting James Poniewozik to write, “As for the at-long-last kiss, It’s to Glee’s credit that it made me think, “Look, an honest-to-God gay kiss, between two men, on my prime-time TV show!”” (Poniewozik 2011a, n.p.). Aly Semigran of MTV felt that this was “a sweet, real and, shockingly, unhyped moment” handled with dignity and honesty (Semigran 2011, n.p.), showing gay kids that it is possible to have a good gay relationship. Meanwhile Jane Lynch, the actor who plays Sue Sylvester, commented, I don’t make these decisions about right time, but I’m glad they did it. I’m glad that there was a kiss between a boy and a boy on television. There were a lot of young people watching it, so, you know, we’ll see it’s just another way to love. (Gajewski 2011, n.p.)

Writing in the Huffington Post, John Mitchell argued that it was hard to overstate the importance of the kiss:

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it wasn’t a peck. It also wasn’t overly sexual or desperate. It wasn’t rushed or clouded with turmoil, and it certainly wasn’t played for laughs, the way many kisses between men are played on TV. (Mitchell 2011, n.p.)

This verdict was echoed by Michael Jensen, editor of AfterElton.com, who saw it as a ground-breaking event for the gay community: it wasn’t the sort of kiss we saw back in the 1990s where the guys pecked each other on the lips—or worse, the camera cutaway... If we still needed proof how far gay characters have come on network TV, Glee just gave it to us. (Mitchell 2011, n.p.)

Noting that LGBTs rarely see themselves as fully-formed, multidimensional characters and not stereotypes on national television, GLAAD President James Barrios noted that a generation of young gay teens had been now given a group of peers to relate to: Glee has raised the bar of what it means to be inclusive on TV, and viewers are turning in by the millions, sending a clear message to networks that Americans not only accept gay and lesbian characters, but they are beginning to expect them. (Mitchell 2011, n.p.)

Barrios concluded by saying “It’s stories like Kurt and Blaine’s that continue to remind gay youth everywhere that there’s nothing wrong with the way you are” (Mitchell 2011, n.p.). The final main character to discover her sexuality is Santana, whose affectionate neck-nuzzling with her best friend Brittany is first seen in “Duets” (season 2, episode 4), but is little alluded to for some time after that. According to Murphy, the relationship started as a joke, and then it gradually became a joke the show played a bit more seriously, as a story of two teenage girls who are attracted to girls AND boys and mostly each other. (Van der Werff 2011b, n.p.)

According to James Poniewozik in Time, this relationship “started off as Glee showing it can be outré and subversive in a primetime teen show.” Poniewozik also felt, however, that their early antics were in keeping with the girls’ parts in the show: “the idea that they just conveniently use each other for pleasure fits the earlier characterisation of them both as rapacious mean girls” (Poniewozik 2011b, n.p.). Later, however, Santana is shown struggling to be true to herself (that is, her lesbian identity) and still

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maintain her status as the hottest girl in school. She can be awesomely mean to her peers, and her move from generic bitchy cheer-leader to a motivated character with inner monologues which often rival Sue’s vindictive, catchphrase-spewing form, certainly makes her a more central character as the series progresses. Like Karofsky, Santana is unable to make her sexual identity public, and she decides to run for Prom Queen in a scheme to win Brittany’s heart (Brittany is dating Artie at the time). In so doing, she arranges to become Karofsky’s “beard” to bolster both their heterosexual facades. When in “Born This Way” (season 2, episode 18), Will Schuester encourages the Glee Club members to receive selfacceptance by embracing their perceived true identities and printing them on their t-shirts, Brittany gives Santana a t-shirt reading “Lebanese,” which she has mistaken for “Lesbian.” Santana baulks at wearing it, and the two argue: Brittany finally storms off saying that if she loved her as much as Brittany loves her, then she would put the shirt on and dance with her. At the end of the episode, while the rest of the Club embrace their true selves and perform “Born This Way,” Santana sits in the audience with Karofsky, wearing her Lebanese t-shirt under a jacket.

“Sexy” and “The First Time” Finally, two episodes in particular deserve special scrutiny for their focus on sexuality education and entertainment. As is evident from the previous discussion, Glee has had plenty of storylines about sex, the consequences of it, and many of its characters having it, but two programs are in fact completely devoted to it. The first is “Sexy” (season 2, episode 15), where quirky sex education teacher Holly Holliday (played by Gwyneth Paltrow in a manner variously described as “off-the-wall” (Futterman 2011, n.p.), “affably game and comically cool” (Flandez 2011a, n.p.), or as “a bit of a floozy... the perfect mentor to these sexually confused kids” (Benigno 2011a, n.p.)), tells Will that the Glee Club members are among the most ignorant about sex in the whole school. As noted earlier, Finn assumed that he had got Quinn pregnant without actually having had intercourse, and it seems that Brittany thought that she had “a bun in the oven” as the stork was building a nest outside her room. “I don’t need to go to a doctor. I just need to look outside my window!” she says. Holly is an unconventional teacher: for example, she uses a conversational Spanish lesson to get her students to recite “How many times has Lindsay Lohan been in rehab?” She is keen to give the students fun lessons, as she feels that life has no consequences, and so she makes a pointed comparison with Will, who thinks that “a good teacher shows the

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students there is more than themselves.” Will’s idea is to trick the kids into learning subliminally through song, which is a cue for Holly to describe sex as “just like hugging, only wetter,” and warn “rule number one: every intimate encounter that you’re going to have in your life is going to start with a touch.” She then launches into a version of Joan Jett’s “Do Ya Wanna Touch Me,” rocking and strutting and gyrating in leather-clad vest and boots in a come-hither chair dance, and counselling “just remember, when you have sex with someone, you have sex with everyone they’ve had sex with... and everyone has a random.” Holly feels that proper information won’t steal the students’ childhood innocence: “It’s what keeps us safe. Don’t be curious until the honeymoon, celibacy ladies!” Meanwhile the sexually-fuelled sub-plots among the Glee Club members promote this apparently urgent need to be taught about adult intimacy and feelings. Following Kurt’s inept and embarrassing performance of “Animal” with the Dalton Academy Warblers, inexperienced Kurt confesses to his boyfriend Blaine that “he doesn’t know the first thing about sex,” and that he has “as much sex appeal as a baby penguin.” Blaine then politely but bluntly browbeats Burt into having The Talk with Kurt, arguing that ignorance is regressive sexual naivete, that Kurt needs to know and should be prepared for it. Kurt is, however, in denial, blocking his ears and singing loudly whenever the topic is mentioned. This behaviour is actually very much in keeping with his character, as Kurt idolises romance, preferring to rely on Broadway musicals as his shield against inevitable disillusionment. Kurt’s struggle to understand his own sexuality is powerfully evoked in this episode: as Todd Van der Werff remarked in The Onion, realising that you’re attracted to people is one part of becoming a sexual being, but realising that...you have to have sex with them too is another, and Kurt’s woefully unsure about how he’s even begin to proceed here. (Van der Werff 2011b, n.p.)

The episode delivers comic relief with Puck and Lauren intending to make a sex tape to become “famous, like a Kardashian,” only to be told by Holly that it is illegal as they are underage, and they would face jail sentences, a fact which prompts Puck to join the Celibacy Club. Holly is sympathetic and non-judgmental: “My sex tape with J.D. Salinger was a disaster!” she confides. Meanwhile, celibacy promoters Emma, Rachel and Quinn croon “Afternoon Delight” in home-made looking prairie dresses, unaware that it is about sex: Emma had thought it was about pigging out on desserts, not “sneaking out for a nooner.” (Rachel’s appearance here is rather puzzling as she had joined the Celibacy Club

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earlier on in the series, basically because she was keen on Finn, who was then a member, but she soon left it, saying that girls want sex just as much as boys do, and insisting that abstinence is impractical and not the only way for teenagers to stay STD and pregnancy free. Her appearance here is apparently needed for plot purposes, and Glee characterisations are often notoriously inconsistent). In the adult battle between abstinence (Emma) and comprehensive sex education (Holly) the latter wins hands down. While Holly talks about celibacy as not a realistic choice for teenagers, Emma preaches abstinence, especially “for those who are older and terrified of the hose monster.” In fact, the argument seems very loaded here, with those people pushing abstinence presented as either idiots or extremely repressed, and perhaps it might have been more effective (although undeniably less amusing) if they had been less caricatured. Meanwhile, Kurt’s father Burt does give him a sex talk, which starts off with the awful awkwardness that one might expect, but then manages to move into something open-hearted and true: “This is gonna suck for both of us, but we’re going to get through it together, and we will both be better men because of it... Kurt, when you’re ready, I want you to be able to do everything, but when you’re ready I want you to use it as a way to connect to another person. Don’t throw yourself around like you don’t matter. Because you matter, Kurt.” (Glee, season 2, episode 15)

Burt’s emphasis here is not so much about the physical aspects of sex, and much more about the emotional, and he is straightforward and honest, especially when talking about the difference between sex and romance. While Burt says that he has no idea what gay people do, even though “you know, I sat through that whole Brokeback Mountain and from what I gather, something went down in that tent,” he then gives Kurt some educational pamphlets about homosexual sex for when he is ready. Kurt is not at all receptive, in keeping with the uncomfortableness of the situation, but he grudgingly agrees to read them later by himself. Finally, Santana tearfully expresses her love for Brittany but is still unable to face public derision and ostracising for being in a same sex relationship, particularly as she has seen what happened when the openly gay Kurt was bullied out of school. The actor Naya Rivera does a fine job of rendering her fear and confusion, sobbing “I’m a bitch because I’m angry, because I have all these feelings for you, that I’m afraid of dealing with, because of the consequences.” In so doing, Santana finally manages

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to articulate everything she is feeling, only to be rejected because at this time while Brittany loves her too, she loves Artie more. While Santana is rarely seen as so serious and vulnerable and the situation is rendered with affecting pathos and heartbreak, not all critics were entirely persuaded that Santana’s conflicted sexuality explained her abrasive personality. For example, Meaghan Brown, in the Atlantic, remained not at all convinced that the root cause of Santana’s meanness comes from her secret desire for lady-kisses, particularly when the lady-kisses are coming from a girl who thinks babies are delivered by storks, Santa is real, and combs are magic. (Fallon, Burns and Brown 2011, n.p.)

It seems evident to me that Glee works best as entertainment and education (both sexual or otherwise) when it focuses on well-paced, wellwritten relationship developments among the core characters. With this in mind, it is instructive to examine the success of this episode, and how well it conveys life messages. Does it work? And if so, why? On the whole, “Sexy” was judged very favourably by the critics, with the parts dealing with the relationship between Santana and Brittany receiving especial praise. The respective journeys of Kurt, towards a greater realisation of the role sex could play in his life, and Santana, towards understanding just what her long relationship with Brittany could mean, were seen as not too overwrought, and it was felt that music and comedy blended effectively and enjoyably with the message. The episode was credited with successfully exploring some of the more complicated aspects of adolescent sexuality, trying to be all-inclusive, and demonstrating that developing sexuality is associated with complexity, fluidity and confusion. The episode had a few critics, like Patrick Burns commenting in The Atlantic that he was “not comfortable with this new formula Glee seems to be adopting in which it picks a subject which is risqué for teenagers, glorifies it for an entire episode and then half-heartedly attempts to hammer home a moral” (Fallon, Burns and Brown 2011, n.p.), but these objections were for the most part rare. Santana and Brittany’s “friendship with benefits” was generally seen as the show’s most compellingly romantic and unexpectedly powerful pairing, with a reviewer in the Atlantic feeling that “the lesbian fling with Santana and Britney was treated with a tender realness, and this is not something we usually get to see on network television” (Fallon, Burns and Brown 2011, n.p.). AfterElton’s Christie Keith declared that the episode “represented queer youth and coming of age in a way I’ve never seen on broadcast television before, let alone one

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of the most popular shows in the country, with a mostly young audience” (Mitchell 2011, n.p.), and James Barrios declared For how often the show delights in being over-the-top, these coming-ofage sexual storylines have been grounded in a way that can only benefit young people, especially sexual minorities... The show has been dealing with the issues they deal with directly and with great care, and it’s heartening to know that in FOX’s Glee, a generation of young gay teens has been given something no generation of LGBT persons has had before them – a group of peers to relate to. (Mitchell 2011, n.p.)

According to Erica Futterman in Rolling Stone, the messages worked: “Glee continues its climb delicately and successfully marrying sex lessons with camp and humour” (Futterman 2011, n.p.), and Kevin Fallon in The Atlantic agreed: “the issues were handled with an appropriate amount of levity – and the lessons were there” (Fallon, Burns and Brown 2011, n.p.). While the hour did get described by Anthony Benigno in The Faster Times as “a little too After-School-Special at times in its depiction of teenage sexuality,” he felt that it was, nevertheless, “incredibly comprehensive and enjoyable to boot” (Benigno 2011a, n.p.). Todd Van der Werff felt that it avoided outright didacticism: the central scenes here... somehow bumped right up against too preachy without ever crossing the line of too preachy. This is a show that loves its soapboxes, but it’s also a show that utilizes those soapboxes pretty well when it needs to. (Van der Werff 2011b, n.p.)

Finally, James Poniewozik gave it the thumbs-up in Time: Like many first awkward adolescent sexual experiences, this one began clumsily, lacked subtlety, involved some embarrassing moments and included too many unwelcome visions of Academy Award Winner Gwyneth Paltrow. But toward the end—and here your early sexual encounters may vary—it also managed to achieve a few moments of delight and honest emotion amid the fumblings. (Poniewozik 2011b, n.p.)

In essence, the episode can be deemed a critical success, delivering sexual information but also, most crucially, dealing sensitively with feelings and relationships and therefore effectively delving into Allen’s “erotic” knowledge that viewers might want to seek out. Then, despite the fact that there had been many previous, apparently uncontroversial, sexual encounters, “The First Time” (season three,

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episode five) deals with the sexual awakening of two of the series’ major characters, Kurt and Rachel. In “The First Time,” the club is performing West Side Story, as usual using songs to comment on the action, and Rachel is to act the part of Maria, while Kurt’s boyfriend Blaine, is playing her lover Tony. Director Artie is so riven with personal doubt about his abilities to deliver a good musical that he resorts to being unusually dictatorial, and he tells them after they deliver a very sweet, but very vanilla rendition of “Tonight,” a song ostensibly about unbridled passion and sexual yearning, that they are not able to project the necessary passion for the role as they are still virgins and they are giving emotionally fake performances. Being desperately monomaniacal, and galvanised by this threat to her musical career (she had told Finn that they would be waiting until she was 25, and after she’d got a Tony), Rachel decides that it is important to lose her virginity before opening night. Finn is clearly delighted and asks Puck about condoms. But Puck replies that he doesn’t know—he’s never used them and that’s worked for him 99% of the time— and soon Finn senses that Rachel has other reasons for it, and refuses to have sex with her just so she can be a better Maria (he’d been saving up for a hotel room so that their first time could be really special, an act thoroughly in keeping with his sweet and naive character). Rachel then seeks the advice of the other girls in the Glee Club, where everyone but Tina tells her to wait. Firstly Quinn warns her against it, following her own humiliating example; then Santana also urges her not to do it, although her reasons are rather different: she bluntly says that Finn was no good in bed and “It was like being smothered by a sweaty, out-of-breath sack of potatoes that somebody soaked in body spray.” Meanwhile, wacky Brittany says “I lost my virginity at cheerleading camp, he just climbed into my tent. Alien invasion.” Finally Tina says that she had sex with Mike over the summer break, and it was gentle, meaningful and loving: “We thought about it for a while, because we knew that the first time was going to be something we’d want to remember forever... It wasn’t rushed. He was my first love and I’ll always look back at that moment as absolutely perfect. No regrets.” (Glee, season 3, episode five)

As Amy Schalet points out in The Huffington Post, this is historical in its own way, “as a young woman, still in high school, recounts pacing herself, deliberating and ultimately truly enjoying sex with her first, though not life-long love” (Schalet 2011, n.p.) . According to Kevin Fallon in The Atlantic, Tina’s candid assertion that at the right moment, with the right person, and after careful consideration, the first time can be something to cherish, is “something every nervous teen should have”

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(Fallon 2011, n.p.). After the performance, Rachel goes to Finn’s house where she finds him distraught, having been told by the college football scout that he is not good enough for a college football career. She apologizes for her previous behaviour: “it was wrong. I was stupid and immature and probably not for the last time lost in my ambition,” and then says that now she is with the boy she loves she is going to give him “something that nobody else will ever get” (this actually sounds rather creepy, and has unfortunate connotations of pity sex). However the decision that this is their “right time” is very much rooted in their larger story, the often unspoken realisation that there are forces that might pull them apart after graduation, with Finn in particular feeling helpless and over-matched, unable to keep up with Rachel as she moves on to bigger things. It would be clear to regular viewers of the show that this is the one way they can be together that is still within their control. Meanwhile, Kurt’s relationship with Blaine has been developing a lingering sexual tension, with Blaine becoming restless after flattery by gay villain Sebastian, who declares that he’s heard that Blaine is “sex on a stick and sings like a dream.” They both visit a gay bar with false identity cards, but Kurt subsequently rejects Blaine trying to deflower him while drunk and aroused in the back seat of the car. Again, this scene is faithful to Kurt’s character, fitting in with his impossibly naive longing for idealised romantic love and his desire for a memorable “first time” (he has previously confessed that he wanted to “have relations” with Taylor Lautner in a dewy meadow). As the reviewer in Time shrewdly noted, Kurt wants to assert his identity as an out gay teen, but also his autonomy to be the kind of gay teen he wants to be: in his case, a sweet, even corny romantic—which itself is a rebellion against highly sexualised teen culture in general... and against a specific sexualised subculture within the gay community. (Poniewozik 2011c, n.p.)

After the West Side Story performance, and after their reconciliation, their moment comes. Kurt and Blaine’s storyline, which involves probably the first instance of gay sex in a mainstream show, also demonstrates that it is the right time in that relationship. Their story emphasises yet again Tina’s message that it’s nice to have sex for the first time with someone you really love and that if you are safe and conscientious it will give you memories that you’ll cherish forever, no matter how the relationship ends. Here with Blaine and Kurt, like Finn and Rachel, “the show is exploring what happens when two people are right for each other in high school but

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almost certainly won’t be the second they graduate” (Van der Werff 2011c, n.p.). All these characters are going on a journey wherein they decide whether or not Lima is a place they want to make better or a place they want to escape as best they can, even if escape only comes for a few fleeting moments in bed. The episode finishes with shots of Rachel and Blaine singing the beautifully a tender ode to love, “One hand, one heart,” undercut with tastefully shot, fire-side scenes of deep happiness and postcoital cuddling. Finally, what were the critics’ reactions to this episode as a whole, and how successful was it deemed to be, both as entertainment and sex education? Chris Colfer anticipated that the episode’s sexual content and themes would prove controversial among television watchdog groups, and noted “I think it’s handled very sweetly and very emotionally. They’re expecting this big, raunchy, suggestive, brainwashing storyline when, really, it’s very sweet” (Gonzalez 2011, n.p.). The Parents Television Council nonetheless called the Fox network reckless for “celebrating teen sex,” and accused Murphy of hypersexualising teens (Fisher 2011, n.p.), reinforcing earlier accusations that Ryan Murphy was intent on promoting unnatural sexual behaviour within a pro-gay agenda: “This is clearly Ryan Murphy’s vision of what growing up should be, not most of America’s. It’s a high school most parents would not want to send their kids to” (Huffington Post 2011, n.p.). Other reviewers found it far less scandalous but were nonetheless more mixed in their enthusiasm than for “Sexy,” citing reasons other than depravity for its shortcomings. According to Brett Berk in The Gay Guide to Glee, for example, this “fledgling fornication-fest” was not a success: The show felt like a cheap novelty act because the kids’ efforts at Losin’. It did not flow organically from the emotional truths of their relationships, or the struggles they were undergoing. Rather the situations were sort-of foisde-gras-ed down their gullets (and pants) so that the show’s writers could cause a little ruckus and get some media attention. (Berk 2012, n.p.)

Moreover, according to Erica Futterman in Rolling Stone, it had all the makings of a Very Important Glee Episode, but instead of a nuanced lesson about self-acceptance punctuated by well-placed music and smart dialogue (and yes, ultimately sex) we got a heavy-handed schooling in waiting for the right moment set against the forced timeline of McKinley High’s West Side Story production. (Futterman 2012, n.p.)

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Ultimately this reviewer declared the episode “clichéd and awkward” (Futterman 2012, n.p.), while Bobby Hankinson in the Houston Chronicle declared that teenage lust was played a touch too sanitised, and that the episode was “tasteful to the point of abstract expressionism” (Hankinson 2011, n.p.). Most other reviewers, though, took the side of Anthony Begnino in The Faster Times, who saw it rather differently: Thankfully this episode is really good. It’s emotional and a bit cheesy... but the writing is tight, the storytelling is efficient, the new villain is instantly loathsome, and they even go out of their way to wrap up a loose end or two... [it] is great, a game-changer for sure as far as plot and the way this show chooses to tell its stories going forward. (Benigno 2011b, n.p.)

Raymund Flandez in The Wall Street Journal commended it for its tasteful restraint, subtle playfulness and smoothly woven storylines (Flandez 2011b, n.p.), and Kevin Fallon in the Atlantic praised the fact that it “treats its characters realistically and sends an important message” (Fallon 2011, n.p.), while for Amy Reiter in the Los Angeles Times it was “far more nuanced, gentle-hearted and romantic than it sounds—much more about love than sex” (Reiter 2011b, n.p.). James Poniewozik, the reviewer in Time, was again full of praise, calling it the best episode, overall, of Glee season three. Kurt and Rachel’s respective virginity stories were rooted in very real, existing relationship dynamics... The episode said a lot of things about sex, negative and positive, but the bottom line was that it made out first time sex to be a big deal. That seems about right. (Poniewozik 2011c, n.p.)

I’d like to return here to the point made in the first part of this chapter, namely that popular culture, and in particular film and television, can be an important site for young people seeking information about sexual feelings and emotions. In “The First Time,” according to Kevin Fallon, the actual sex aspect of the storylines is treated quite delicately... In this episode the emphasis is on the overwhelming emotional rollercoaster that surrounds the act, far more so than the physical aspects of it... the show focuses on the romance of it all, with both couples coming to the mutual decision that it is, in fact, “the right time.” (Fallon 2011, n.p.)

The issue is handled responsibly, given the false starts, with Kurt in particular demonstrating the offensiveness of going through sex when one party is not entirely comfortable with it. In the end, both couples have extremely romantic sex for the right reasons. As Rachel puts it, “When

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and who is going to feel more right than you and now?” Ultimately “The First Time” sends a message to young people that sex is great in the right circumstances, with the right person, and in a very loving relationship. As Fallon further noted, rarely has the act been portrayed with as much thought to the impressionability of young viewers and the honesty of the situation...The remarkable, if not revolutionary other element here, of course, is that the decision by gay teen characters to lose their virginities is given equal weight to that of a straight couple...from the nerves, to the passion to the actual footage of the act, Blaine and Kurt’s first time was given the same consideration, weight and respect as their straight counterparts—a milestone for network TV.

He concluded: Glee often sacrifices character development in service of a good message. This was the rare example of a Glee episode that managed to do both: treat its characters realistically and also send an important message. The first time is scary, romantic, awkward—and worth taking seriously. (Fallon 2011, n.p.)

Amy Reiter was equally positive about Glee’s message about erotic love: It’s an episode, yes, about sex (teen sex, gay sex) but really about love, the kind that comes with flowers and thoughtfulness and music swelling in the background. And while Glee doesn’t have to teach young watchers anything, if it teaches them that sex can be meaningful, and that the first time can be magical, well, that’s something not to protest, but to celebrate. (Reiter 2011b, n.p.)

Finally, writing in The Huffington Post, sociologist Amy Schalet called for the media to supply viewers with many more “cultural narratives of love—its thrills and obligations—that are suited to teenagers’ life phase and can guide their hearts along with their bodies” (Schalet 2011, n.p.). In her opinion, Glee delivers this narrative when “two couples in love—one heterosexual and one gay—dance around potential virginity loss against the background of West Side Story’s melodies. And when both couples finally decide to make love at the end of that episode, they do so without a rush, without the haze of alcohol, and without reason for regret.” The

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result is “a positive media portrayal of first sexual experience—planned, protected, yet ignited by sexual passion” (Schalet 2011, n.p.).

Conclusion This chapter has argued that the American television series, Glee, plays an important part in providing lessons in sex and romance to young audiences, and in shaping them as responsible, caring partners. Glee is concerned with the proper management of human sexuality, and about sexual morals, tolerance and love. It is likely that its messaging is considerably more effective than the school experience, especially since according to Jeffrey Moran in Teaching Sex, sex education in America even at the beginning of the twentieth century was about aiding youths in “remaining chaste until the time of their monogamous, heterosexual marriage” (Moran 2000, 197). Because Glee offers a less rigid, more nuanced view of teenage love, confusion, uncertainty and sexual identity it can capitalise on and compensate for the deficiencies of sex education programs in schools. In the end a television series such as this can successfully promote what the schools seem to be unable or unwilling to. And so finally, once more, to the notion of film and its role in channelling adolescent sexual behaviour into approved routes. According to Toby Miller (2001, 172), Hollywood films and television series may be seen as potential forums for moral uplift, as vehicles for provoking social responsibility as audiences participate in probably the most global, communal and time-consuming practice of making meaning in world history. Meanwhile, Henry Giroux is less sanguine, arguing that because the entertainment industry is deeply imbricated within the material and symbolic relations of power, it tends to produce and incorporate ideologies that represent the outcomes of struggles marked by the historical realities of power and the deep anxieties of the times (Giroux 2002, 30). Speaking in 2004, Kenneth Kidd argued that popular teen films teach adolescents about options in love and life, steering them towards sexual and cultural heterodoxy and emphasising the pleasure and profit of normative desire. What results, according to him, is often a conservative film with a veneer of sexual radicalism (Kidd 2004, 98). I am arguing here that Glee works differently to the manner ascribed by Giroux and Kidd. Television shows undeniably fulfil an important function by narrativising and giving order to the otherwise chaotic and contradictory experience of youth by historicising, contextualising, re-presenting it. At its worst, Glee can be seen to be too proselytising and too eager for trendy all-inclusiveness; at

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its best it offers good stories without excessive preachiness to young people who enjoy entertainment and often choose to consume it in order to seek life information. At its most sublime, its most truly “teachable” moments, Glee works as a powerful site for young people to explore themselves, and shape their identities, sexual and otherwise.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Lesley Hawkes is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and Literary Studies at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. She has written chapters and articles on popular fiction, environmental writing, and children’s literature. Sharyn Pearce is a Professor in Creative Writing and Literary Studies at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. She has an international reputation in youth and children’s writing, and her research includes over 40 articles and book chapters in the area, as well as a number of books and edited works. Her best-known work, Youth Cultures: Texts, Images and Identities (co-edited with Kerry Mallan) was an International Research Society for Children’s Literature Honour Book in 2003 and remains the benchmark in the scholarly analysis of youth texts. Vivienne Muller is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and Literary Studies at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. She has published a number of articles on YA fiction including the writing of Sonya Hartnett, Mark Haddon, Neil Gaiman, and more recently Suzanne Collins. She was co-editor and contributor of the 2002 publication Manning the Next Millennium with Sharyn Pearce.

INDEX

adolescents, 25, 46, 65, 67, 114, 124, 176, 183–85, 200 adolescent readers, 5, 19, 26, 45 alienation, 24, 114, 116–18, 120, 123, 127, 134, 136–37 Avatar, 8, 145–47, 148, 155–56, 162–69 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 28 Baudrillard, Jean, 60, 62, 71 Blade, 7, 85, 89–91, 94–95, 99–100, 107 Boyne, John, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, 5, 17, 31–39 Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 7, 88, 91– 95, 100, 103, 106 Butler, Judith, 168 children, 18, 56, 74, 114, 147, 154, 168 texts, 2, 18–21, 44–45, 48–49, 66, 148 Collins, Suzanne, The Hunger Games, 1, 6, 44–45, 47, 49–61, 62–74 Catching Fire, 56, 61, 64, 68–69 Mockingjay, 51, 61–64, 73 de Certeau, Michel, 68 didacticism, 18, 38, 72, 74, 146–48, 164, 169, 181–83, 183 dystopia, 45–48 dystopian texts, 2, 5–6, 44–55, 64–67, 72–74 ecology, 48 Deep ecology, 148 ecocriticism, 146, 148–50, 152 education, 175 environmental issues, 143, 147 ethics education, 154 sex education, 8, 176, 185, 190– 93, 200–201

social issues, 44, 56 teaching, 31, 43, 112, 147–48, 176, 200 environment, 3, 8, 143, 146–53, 162–70 destruction of, 48, 148–50, 160, 167 environmental epics, 8, 147, 162, 169–70 evil, 19–21, 28, 47, 67, 71, 86, 92, 145, 155–56, 160 family, 35, 72, 107, 128–30, 135– 36, 178 fantasy, 2, 20, 144–47, 153–56, 157, 161, 169 epic fantasy, 8, 145–47, 151–53, 169 film, 1–2, 72, 84, 87–90, 145–47, 154, 155, 159–60, 166, 176, 198, 200 Foucault, Michel, 54 future, 5, 43, 45–48, 52, 66, 72, 176 of environment, 3, 143, 149, 152 gender, 6, 65–66, 72, 86, 91, 93–94, 100, 103, 127, 178–79 genre, 5–6, 16, 20, 85, 144, 154 horror, 83–84, 86, 88, 101 magic realism, 5, 24–31 romance, 6, 86–87, 101–2, 103 science fiction, 47, 96, 162 Glee, 8, 175–201 graphic novels, 2, 7, 111, 115, 122, 130, 138 graphic novel techniques, 115, 126, 133, 137 hero, 88–90 heroism, 32, 38, 93 heroes, 53, 58, 65, 66, 85–86, 88–90, 93, 99, 103, 124, 145, 155, 162–63

212 history, 5, 14–19, 21–22, 32, 38–39, 113–14, 121–22, 138, 155 Holocaust, 13, 47, 114, 135 Holocaust literature, 2, 5, 15–22, 24–29, 32, 36–39 hope, 5, 21, 32, 44, 66, 73, 135 horror, 15, 19–20, 26, 28–29, 53, 56, 61–62, 80 identity, 4, 25, 48, 63–66, 69, 112, 120–21, 136–38, 168 cultural identity, 98, 114–16, 126–28 identity formation, 65, 121, 175 sexual identity, 190, 200 teenage identity, 178–79 language, 29, 58, 89, 133, 148, 150, 153, 161 inadequacy of, 13–14, 16–17 Luen Yang, Gene, American Born Chinese, 7, 114–21, 138 Meyer, Stephenie, Twilight, 1, 6, 85–89, 91, 94, 98, 107 morality, 15–19, 22, 26, 31, 37, 46, 58, 64–71, 74, 115, 118, 156, 159, 200 Other, 25, 26, 33–34, 68, 104, 116– 18, 120, 130, 151, 153, 168 politics, 48, 112–13, 121–26, 138 political oppression, 24, 123, 125, 128–30, 135 political structures, 3, 24, 44, 74 sexual oppression, 130 sexual politics, 123, 127, 131 popular culture, 4, 15, 79–80, 85– 86, 91–94, 98–101, 144, 175–76, 178, 198 cultural knowledge, 6–7, 79, 82, 85–86, 91, 99, 101 power, 6–7, 38, 48, 63, 66–68, 96, 98, 112, 114, 127, 129, 200 realism, 5, 16–17, 20, 151 Said, Edward, 125 Satrapi, Marjane, Persepolis, 7, 115, 121–30, 136, 138 Persepolis 1, 123–27 Persepolis 2, 127–29

Index sex, 8, 65, 93, 100, 106–7, 127, 176–78, 181, 183–201 Shake Girl, 7, 115, 130–33, 138 speech, 14–15, 17, 146–48 Stoker, Bram, Dracula, 7, 80–84, 86–87, 89–91, 97, 99–103 Tan, Shaun, 134, 138 The Arrival, 7, 115, 133–38 technology, 5, 8, 45, 47–49, 54–55, 64, 91, 145, 155–56, 160, 162, 165–68 Tolkien, J. R. R., 145, 153–61 The Hobbit, 8, 145–48, 155–56, 160, 164, 167, 169 The Lord of the Rings, 8, 145– 48, 154–61, 164, 169 transformation, 44, 73, 134, 152, 168 as effect of literature, 16, 23 of self, 26, 118–20 of setting, 24–25, 43, 60 transhistoric mode, 17, 24–26, 37– 38 True Blood, 7, 88, 89, 104–7 utopia, 5, 46–47, 72, 120, 135, 150 utopian literature, 43, 45–49, 66 vampires, 2, 6–7, 79–92, 94–107 vampire conventions, 82, 88, 99– 100 video games, 57–59, 61, 72 violence, 5, 19, 44–45, 55–58, 71– 72, 91, 94, 120, 154 war, 5, 13–14, 24, 30, 45–46, 48, 56–59, 61–63, 65, 71–73, 129 Westerfeld, Scott, Peeps, 7, 88, 96– 98, 100, 106–7 young adults, 1–5, 20, 26, 85 young adult texts, 1–8, 19, 21– 22, 25, 43, 45, 47–48, 52–53, 64, 66, 73, 74 young people, 1, 3–8, 18–20, 25, 38, 45, 47–48, 52, 56, 71, 74, 111– 12, 143–47, 175–78, 181, 194, 198 youth, 1–2, 4–5, 7–8, 31, 35, 45, 61, 66, 138, 143, 175–76, 200–201

Popular Appeal: Books and Films in Contemporary Youth Culture youth culture, 2, 7, 111, 121

213

Zusak, Markus, The Book Thief, 1, 5, 17, 21–31, 38