Adventures Into Otherness: Child Metamorphs in Late Twentieth-Century Literature (review)

Adventures Into Otherness: Child Metamorphs in Late Twentieth-Century Literature is Maria Lassén-Seger's exploration of stories in which young protagonists in British and American children's literature metamorphose into animals, plants, monsters, and objects. She is specifically concerned with how metamorphosis relates to empowerment/disempowerment. (Empowerment is defined here in the feminist sense of self-awareness and agency, as opposed to the ability to dominate others.)

Each of the chapters, apart from the introduction and conclusion, deals with a different sort of metamorphosis. The first of these is "Wild and Uncivilised Child Metamorphs," and it concerns children who turn into animals or objects and/or children for whom metamorphosis is an unpleasant experience. Lassén-Seger explains that she had originally assumed that such stories would reflect adults' desire to make children conform to social and gender expectations, as in C.S. Lewis' Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952), when the spoiled Eustace is punished by becoming a dragon. However, she finds that, while some books do follow this pattern, others use metamorphosis for other purposes. For example, Patrice Kindl's Owl in Love (1993) challenges, rather than enforces, gender stereotypes. Lassén-Seger concludes that even those stories that use metamorphosis in a disempowering way may not be disempowering to the young reader: "Not every reader, whether child or adult, can be assumed to read for identification, and [many texts] openly invite and encourage even very young readers actively to participate in the process of meaning-making" (97).

In "Innocent, Playful, and Rebellious Child Metamorphs," Lassén-Seger uses play and carnival theory to examine those books in which metamorphosis is a pleasurable and/or playful experience. She notes that, in this, children's literature differs from adults literature: usually, adult characters find metamorphosis a frightening threat to identity rather than a pleasure. Unlike some of the books in the first chapter, the pleasant/playful metamorphosis stories tend to be less repressive for the protagonists. Child characters are apt to use their experience to question adult authority instead of learning to conform to social expectations. On the other hand, Lassén-Seger suggests that the happy child metamorphs and the miserable adult ones reflect stereotypes in themselves. Children's identities are viewed as unformed and flexible, and so open to change. In contrast, adults are supposed to have fully formed identities and to resist changes. Such essentializing can overemphasize the differences between children and adults until the equally important similarities disappear.

In addition, Lassén-Seger discovers that empowerment in the pleasurable metamorphosis category is not always simple. For example, metamorphosis in the popular Animorphs series is a source of agency, but it is also associated with rigid discipline and repression of individual desires. In books with a carnival plot pattern of normal life/metamorphosis/return, the return often diminishes any metamorphic rebellion.

In "Victimised and Lost Child Metamorphs," Lassén-Seger considers stories in which protagonists metamorphose out of fear, misery, and/or the need to escape, and those in which protagonists either are forced to remain in metamorphosis or choose to do so. As with the other categories of metamorphosis, she concludes that there is no single "message" that the authors are sending to young readers. Instead, they use metamorphosis to explore complex matters, "such as innocence and experience, power and powerlessness, security and danger, freedom and oppression, as well as resistance and negotiation" (254). In most cases, Lassén-Sager finds that empowerment/disempowerment is ambiguous. For example, in Melvin Burgess's Lady: My Life as a Bitch (2001), Sandra decides to stay in her dog-shape. Sandra defies a good many gender stereotypes during the course of the novel, but Lassén-Sager finds the ending a pessimistic and disempowering one. Rather than face the responsibilities and troubles of adulthood, Sandra flees into dogdom.

Lassén-Sager observes that permanent metamorphosis is a more common resolution in books from the 1980s and...