Males Performing in a Female Space: Music and Gender in Young Adult Novels

In a number of novels for young adults, the apparently gender-free act of performing music is connected surprisingly often with concepts of gender. How do these works define and encourage the construction of subjectivity, particularly male subjectivity? What does the connection between gender and music tell us about conceptions of gender, and what does it tell us about conceptions of music?

This project began when I noticed the similarity in two novels, both about young boys, both intended for young adult readers, and both by women: Ursula Le Guin's Very Far Away from Anywhere Else and Suzanne Newton's I Will Call It Georgie's Blues. Like many other young adult novels, these two are about boys who feel different—at odds with the values of their family, especially their fathers, who expect them to act conventionally, and with their contemporaries, who expect a different but equally unpalatable sort of conventional behavior. Also as in many other young adult novels, both boys work to keep the truth about themselves hidden, and find another world, a Utopian place apart, where they are free to express their true secret selves.

What is noteworthy is that in both cases the separate secret place is not only connected with musical performance, but belongs to a female—in Newton a woman who secretly teaches the boy piano in her home, and in Le Guin a girlfriend who plays piano. In Georgie's Blues the boy feels his true self only at the piano, and in Far Away the girl's music is equated with the boy's actual secret fantasy of a separate world organized to his taste. Music connects the boys with an artificial family of like-minded people both dead and alive, composers and performers whom they feel more communion with than with their own actual families. For as the furtive activities of the secret place become known and the boys' actual families threaten to disintegrate, the public performance of music signals a different sort of harmony and wholeness; the boys acknowledge their rejection of their fathers' values and their adoption of the values of the female-connected family that music represents.

Several things intrigue me here: the peculiar coincidence of the discovery of music and the denial of fathers; the relation of music to a safe space away from a distressing world, a place that represents a paradoxical conflation of perfection and selfhood, both Utopia and what one secretly actually is; and music's connection with femininity, a feminine order which a male chooses as an act of defiance against his father's conventional male values. These boys become triumphantly themselves by choosing the secret music of the female space over a silence or cacophony identified with the male authority that the world expects of them. A female music represents the essence of their presumably male selfhood.

Other young adult novels about performers make similar connections between music and gender. For instance, Come Sing, Jimmy Jo, by Katherine Paterson, is about a musician named James, who to begin with makes music only in his grandmother's house (another private space controlled by a woman). A male intruder into this space, an agent representing the commercial interests of the big world outside, forces the reluctant James to perform in public—the move that occurs near the end of the two other novels—where he learns to preserve the values of the female space even in a world at odds with them. But while Jimmy Jo makes the same connections among femininity, music, and private space, and between maleness and public space, it tells the next part of what appears to be a common story: what happens to a male performer after what now begins to seem like a gestation period, after the performer is born out of the protective private female space into a world where others, either males or women seduced by male values, claim him and try to control and change him. Furthermore, one of those others in Jimmy Jo is James's actual father, who tries to replace the...