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7. Adolescent Reform Novels: The Legacy of Twain and Alcott
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chapter seven Adolescent Reform Novels The Legacy of Twain and Alcott “The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.” —salinger, The Catcher in the Rye “We are together . . . because we have to learn to live for each other.” —hamilton, The Planet of Junior Brown U p to this point, I have discussed novels that might easily be identified as adolescent reform novels. Novels that admit the possibility of reform tend to have hopeful ideologies. Many of Alcott’s and Twain’s novels for youth imply that social change is possible: Eight Cousins, Rose in Bloom, and The Prince and the Pauper are the most notable examples.The legacies of these novels are a body of literature for youth with an ideological investment in reform. Whether the reform ideology in a text concerns itself with gender or race or politics or any other social issue, novels for adolescents written in the traditions established by Alcott and Twain communicate that adolescents can make a social difference. That is, if Rose Campbell or Edward Tudor can become more educated and thus more sensitive to the needs of the poor, so can the reader—and so can the members of the society about whom the text is commenting. In the case of both Alcott and Twain, the reform impulse evolves from their romantic evangelical faith in education as a means of reform, and that impulse was reinforced by their novels’ popularity. The narrative and ideological patterns that Twain and Alcott developed appear almost formulaically in the adolescent literature that the two have influenced. Adolescent reform novels share several characteristics. The protagonist is an ethical character who transcends his or her society by some form of selfreliance . He or she lives in a society that is demonstrably less ethical than s/he. That society’s need to improve its values is made evident either by directly depicted flaws in the culture or by the character being falsely repressed by it. If the protagonist experiences growth—and s/he usually does—that growth 143 provides a commentary as to how the society itself might also “grow” (i.e., improve). And the character’s growth is a sign that the society can, indeed, potentially change. The protagonist grows as a means of communicating the hope for social change. Ultimately, these texts articulate direct agendas of social justice: the growth that the characters in the story experience leads to at least one or more person’s ability to live in the world more justly. Thesetextssharearomanticfaithintheabilityofyouthtoimprovethefuture. The message to readers is, invariably, “with self-improvement, you can improve the world.” Twenty-first-century critics take it as a given that novels for youth often rely on adolescents’ growth and imply hope in the future. What we often fail to recognize, however, is how frequently these texts create a parallel between the individual’s need to grow and the society’s need to improve itself. In focusing on the growth of an individual character, we often miss the metaphorical use to which the individual’s growth has been put. But the social agenda advocating reform appears in twenty-first-century novels for youth as consistently as it did in novels for youth in the late nineteenth century. In this chapter, I will identify some novels that fit the pattern of the adolescent reform novel, especially in the ways that the genre appears to have been influenced by Twain and Alcott. I will also contrast the novels in that legacy to novels that operate in different paradigms , and I will conclude with an argument about the importance of Twain and Alcott’s combined legacy in the history of American literature. Huck Finn’s Progeny While I do not agree with Hemingway’s pronouncement that all American literature descends from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, I certainly do think the novel has been a major influence on American adolescent literature.1 As Eliot observed in 1950, Huckleberry Finn is the first book written entirely in a vernacular style (323). Fishkin further develops that point in noting that Twain was the first to have a first-person vernacular narrator who was also an adolescent (Was 3). The narrator’s irony was also precedent-setting because Huck was the first narrator whose youth allowed him to create dramatic irony with his innocently inaccurate proclamations. Moreover, Twain established the American pattern of...