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chapter 6 Conclusion the poststructural pedagogy of adolescent literature T he dynamics of power/repression I have discussed in the previous chapters are interrelated. Certainly no institution exists in isolation; no discursive construct possibly can. Since institutions such as school, religion , church, identity politics, and family are invested in socializing adolescents, the depiction of these institutions in adolescent literature are logically implicated in the establishment of narrative authority and in the ideological manipulation of the reader. Cultural representations of death and sex also rely on the adolescent’s need to feel empowered and the culture’s simultaneous need to repress the adolescent. As a result, discursive representations of adolescents’ power and repression can be found integrated in all ya novels. For example, in Chapter 2 I discussed how M. E. Kerr’s novel Is That You, Miss Blue? integrates rebellion against school with rebellion against religion. But the novel also shows how rebellion against institutional authority is tied to rebellion against one’s parents : Carolyn Cardmaker and Agnes Thatcher found the Atheists Against All Cruelty to punish Carolyn’s father (an Episcopalian minister) and the Charles School where they attend boarding school. The pranks these two play allow them to experience a sense of power against their parents, their school, and their church in one fell swoop. Much of the anger the rebels in this book feel resides in their awareness of institutionalized identity politics: Carolyn, Agnes, and the narrator, Flanders, are angry at the Charles School’s class-based sorority for reinforcing class stratification. Agnes is angry at the social construction of the deaf in her culture. Flanders is angry with her mother for not maintaining a traditional gender role — an anger that Flanders ultimately resolves when she finally begins talking to her mother again and feels that ‘‘I’d been seen and heard on my own’’ for the first time (158). She expresses her individuation as a discursive construct: she is visually seen as object, she is aurally heard as subject, and so she feels recognized by her mother and thus able to participate in the Symbolic Order. Sexuality also plays a factor in Flanders’s growth. She has an admirer, Sumner Thomas, who conflates sexuality with his fear of mortality. His mother has committed suicide, and Sumner is obsessed with her (70–73, 97, 128–129, 165–166). He explores his obsession discursively, writing poems that Flanders eventually recognizes as a synthesis of his feelings about sex and his feelings about his mother (165). Sumner is re-creating his mother in logos parentis, trying to make her manifest in words: You are words like ‘‘toward,’’ ‘‘in,’’ ‘‘here,’’ ‘‘yes,’’ ‘‘now,’’ ‘‘come,’’ and ‘‘part of.’’ I am sliding. You are ‘‘hush,’’ ‘‘dear,’’ ‘‘oh!’’ ‘‘Open,’’ ‘‘touch.’’ I am sliding. You are ‘‘darling’’ (I can) ‘‘always’’ (not) ‘‘love me’’ (hold) ‘‘dearest’’ (out) ‘‘my’’ (much) ‘‘beloved’’ (longer) I am a word like yours. (128–129) Sumner is Being-towards-death; Flanders recognizes that he must work through his emotional tension with his dead mother before he can grow. Flanders also watches her teacher Miss Blue lose her sanity. The visual symbol of Miss Blue’s martyrdom at the hands of her rebellious students is a portrait of Mary, Queen of Scots, that Miss Blue gazes at desiringly throughout the narrative. Eventually, Poststructural Pedagogy : 143 Flanders and her friends steal the picture and give it to Miss Blue to take with her after the Charles School fires her. Since the picture no longer hangs in its shrinelike position in the bathroom, Flanders experiences the image as one of repetition with variation. Thereafter, when she thinks of Miss Blue, she thinks of the portrait , feels grief, and fears for her teacher’s vulnerability and possible death (169). A recursively used picture that becomes a mark of Flanders’s maturity has resulted from Miss Blue’s martyrdom. Because of Flanders’s relationships with Miss Blue and with Sumner , sex, death, and discourse become mutually implicated. No single event in Is That You, Miss Blue? occurs isolated from one teenage character’s perception of the role power and repression play in her life. Pedagogy In the traditional study of adolescent literature, Entwicklungsromane like Is That You, Miss Blue? have either been overlooked or have been studied for their pedagogical value. Caroline Hunt explains why in ‘‘Young Adult Literature Evades the Theorists.’’ She describes the study of Young Adult literature as a field which has experienced a ‘‘striking lack of theoretical criticism’’ (4) and finds...

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