Melancholia and Maturation: The Use of Trauma in American Children’s Literature (review)

Undergraduates in my introductory children’s literature courses often express surprise at what they consider the darker aspects of juvenile fiction. “I don’t remember this book being so sad,” they often write in response to texts such as Little Women or Harriet the Spy. Likewise, they are taken aback by the implicit and explicit representations of violence in children’s classics, claiming not to remember Wilbur’s near death-by-hatchet in Charlotte’s Web or Pumpkin’s execution in Johnny Tremain. The very fact that my students—like many adult readers—seem to have forgotten (or as it were, screened out) the traumatic moments depicted in these texts speaks, I believe, to the powerful hold that the Romantic notion of childhood still has on the collective Western imagination. Both childhood and literature for children, it is still commonly believed, should be sites of whimsy and joy—and if popular children’s texts deviate from this dictum, they are either deemed exceptional or are conveniently forgotten.

According to Eric Tribunella, however, the use of trauma in children’s literature—specifically, American children’s literature—is actually the norm rather than an exception. In the course of his important and beautifully written monograph, Melancholia and Maturation: The Use of Trauma in American Children’s Literature, Tribunella argues that American literary works written specifically for young people tend to rely on a common plot device: a child or young adult becomes attached to a friend, animal, or ideal and subsequently matures upon suffering the traumatic loss of the beloved object of her/his affection. Although the characters and settings of these stories tend to vary, and the objects of affection take different forms—for example, best friend, animal companion, or youthful ideal—the ultimate outcome of these narratives is the same: protagonists of U.S. children’s literature emerge sadder but wiser upon having survived a traumatic loss. Such experience of loss and subsequent maturation, Tribunella maintains, is specifically melancholic in character. Succinctly paraphrasing Freud’s definition of melancholy as the “incorporation of the [lost] object into one’s own ego as the form of an identification, which preserves the lost object internally in a way that fundamentally alters the psyche,” (xvi) Tribunella argues that the “melancholic maturation” (96) depicted in American children’s literature involves incorporation of a lost, loved object whose sacrifice enables the protagonist to become more “sober,” “responsible,” “knowing,” and “experienced” (xxi). Here, Tribunella positions his argument against the conventional belief that melancholia is “tantamount to being ill or disordered” (xxiv). Rather, he argues, the experience of melancholia—at least in the ways it is imagined in children’s literature—“mirrors notions of the mature adult as calm and contemplative, having been rid of the exuberance and joy of youth” (xxv).

Literary depictions of melancholic maturation, Tribunella writes, are certainly not unproblematic; indeed, they tend implicitly to equate maturation with ideological, and specifically heteronormative, values and desires. For example, both the child protagonist and the intended reader of such texts are prompted by literary works not only to become “sober” and “responsible,” but “law-abiding” and “hard-working”—attributes privileged in a society still more or less governed by the Puritan work ethic (xxii). Moreover, according to Tribunella, literature for young people tends to equate melancholic maturation with the performance of a “heteronormatively gendered” identity—a performance that calls for the sacrifice of ideologically proscribed sexual attachments (xxii).

Tribunella is especially concerned with the processes by which this latter performance occurs, and he devotes his first two chapters to analyzing its representation in books featuring both human-human and human-animal friendships. In his first chapter, “Losing and Using Queer Youth,” he demonstrates how children’s and young adult classics like John Knowles’s A Separate Peace (1959) and Katherine Paterson’s Bridge to Terebithia (1977) rationalize the deaths of queer characters by intimating that their loss is necessary to their respective protagonists...