Twain, Alcott, and the Birth of the Adolescent Reform Novel (review)

In nineteenth-century American literature, the figure of the child often serves as an inverted image of citizenship. By portraying the child's subjection to parental authority, writers gave meaning to the opposing ideals of political consent, agency, and autonomy. ¹ In her new book, Twain, Alcott, and the Birth of the Adolescent Reform Novel, Roberta Seelinger Trites draws attention to a figure who complicates the child/citizen opposition: the adolescent. Caught between dependence and autonomy, the adolescent marks a place where adulthood and social authority appear not as stable conditions but as ambiguous and contested processes. The very embodiment of change, the adolescent tells a story in which maturation is emphasized over maturity. In this, Trites argues, the adolescent (or "youth"—since, as she points out, the former term only comes into use in the twentieth century [33]) emerged during the nineteenth century as a symbol for both the necessity of and the capacity for individual and national reform, recasting citizenship as a process of self-critique and growth. Trites posits a specifically American literary tradition of "adolescents whose rebellions are linked to social critique" (ix), and she traces its origin to Louisa May Alcott and Mark Twain—creators of the century's most famous adolescent protagonists, Jo March and Huckleberry Finn. Exceptionalist claims aside, the connection that Trites proposes between adolescent literature and reform discourse is fascinating and of significance to literary critics and social historians alike. Alcott and Twain offer a rich context in which to explore this thesis, and Trites demonstrates an encyclopedic knowledge of their works. This pairing, however, ultimately proves to be the book's greatest weakness. For Trites dedicates the majority of her energies to justifying it by enumerating similarities in Alcott and Twain's lives and writing. In the end, this catalog dominates the argument and does little to inform her analysis of adolescence and reform.

Trites organizes her study into seven chapters. Four of these present comparative critical analyses: chapter 2 addresses Alcott and Twain's use of adolescent protagonists, chapters 4 and 5 outline their response to education reform and gender ideology, and chapter 7 traces their influence in twentieth and twenty-first century adolescent literature. Interspersed with these are three more chapters that Trites refers to as "historical interludes": chapter 1 reviews Twain and Alcott's biographies, chapter 3 examines the writers' relationships to nineteenth-century religious movements, and chapter 6 situates them in relation to nineteenth-century print culture. Of the seven, chapter 2 is the strongest and, not incidentally, the one most closely devoted to Trites's thesis. Focusing on The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Little Women, it frames Huck and Jo as prototypical adolescent reformers who model the need for social change. Trites argues that their rebellious natures coupled with their common plight of liminal authority—no longer free of responsibility but not yet fully empowered to act—focuses attention on the struggle for growth. For Jo this struggle concerns the limits of middle-class femininity; for Huck, overcoming racial prejudice. As Trites notes, nineteenth-century children's literature conventionally portrays personal growth as a shift from self-absorption to concern for others (39)—a point that seems relevant in relation to reform culture, and specifically in relation to the acts of sympathetic identification that reform literature encouraged. It would have been interesting to see this connection pursued, for example, in response to the critics who find that Huck's affection for Jim serves primarily to reaffirm racial difference. Trites does suggest, intriguingly, that if critics are correct that Huck fails to grow, then this very failure (and Twain's decision, contrary to his publisher's wishes, against writing Huck into adulthood) was a strategy for keeping focus on the ongoing need for national reform. The book's strongest discussion of Alcott happens in chapter 5's exploration of gender ideology. Examining the writer's often ambivalent characterization of adolescent girls, Trites argues that these reveal...