Freud in Oz: At the Intersections of Psychoanalysis and Children’s Literature

5. “A Case History of Us All”: The Adolescent Novel before and after Salinger

139 L ike the adolescent, the adolescent novel has long been understood as a psychological form. This chapter historicizes the psychologization of adolescence and its literature, beginning not with the so-called problem novel for teenagers in the 1960s and 1970s,1 a familiar starting place, but rather much earlier, with the foundational work of G. Stanley Hall. I identify three major stages in the psychologization of the genre: first, the articulation of adolescence in psychological as well as literary terms, beginning with Hall; second, the literary-psychological-ethnographic framing of a problem interior in and around the notion of “identity” and by way of explorations of gender and sexuality; and third, the transformation of that interior into a “young adulthood” at once confident and highly vulnerable, in such a way that adolescent literature begins to overlap with the literature of trauma. I am indebted to Leerom Medovoi’s Rebels: Youth and the Cold War Origins of Identity, which links the midcentury rise of “identity” as an American keyword to the coterminous emergence of two other categories, “teenager” and “rebel.” Medovoi argues further that identity became a literary as well as a psychological term, calling this transformation “the protagonization of the American character” (2005, 56) and 5. “A Case History of Us All” The Adolescent Novel before and after Salinger 140 “a case history of us all” citing as its exemplary text J. D. Salinger’s 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye. The adolescent novel is but one index for Medovoi of the interlocking themes of rebellion and identity; Rebels is more a study of youth culture than of adolescent literature. Still, it helps set the stage for my analysis of adolescent literature and psychological discourse. I also take a cue from Julia Kristeva’s essay “The Adolescent Novel.” “The adolescent,” she proposes, “is a mythical figure of the imaginary that enables us to distance ourselves from some of our failings, splittings of the ego, disavowals, or mere desires, which it reifies into the figure of someone who has not yet grown up” (1995, 135). As a psychoanalyst Kristeva believes in the imaginary, the ego, and so forth, thus tending to universalize adolescence as a psychological experience. But she also gives that mythical figure of the imaginary a cultural history, proposing that adolescence and the novel emerged in relation to one another around the eighteenth century, with the rise of “psychological man” (her term). In her essay we see a productive tension between the historical and the psychological, a tension that Kristeva exploits rather than resolves, allowing for psychology (and adolescence) to be at once historical and ahistorical. Kristeva’s formulation of the “‘adolescent economy’ of writing” (139) helps historicize the psychological aspects of the adolescent and the novel but also instantiates the third stage mentioned above, the construction of a vulnerable subjectivity. Even if the novel and adolescent writing have eighteenth-century origins, as Kristeva maintains, the adolescent novel is a more modern and rather American phenomenon, one bound up with psychological discourse. With respect to Medovoi, I see the protagonization of the American character as beginning not with the midcentury theorists of identity but rather with Hall and an earlier wave of literary adolescence . In his monumental two-volume 1904 work Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion, and Education, Hall not only takes up these various “relations” but also calls for the creation of a literature specifically for adolescents. Hall’s romantic, developmentalist view of adolescence , positioned both alongside and against psychoanalysis, paved the way not only for the rise of teen-affiliated identity and identity politics but also for the prescriptive approach to adolescent literature now called bibliotherapeutic. “a case history of us all” 141 In narrating the pre–Catcher in the Rye history of adolescent literature , I neglect what Roberta Seelinger Trites calls the “adolescent reform novel,” in part because her work on the subject is so illuminating . In Twain, Alcott, and the Birth of the Adolescent Reform Novel (2007), Trites proposes that the social reform novel, as pioneered by Mark Twain and Louisa May Alcott, continues to shape writing for adolescents, not only through particular themes and plots but also through their collective promotion of the adolescent as a “metaphor” for reform.2 Hall’s faith in the adolescent as a potential citizen may derive in part from the social reform...