Reading Like a Girl: Narrative Intimacy in Contemporary American Young Adult Literature

4. “She Doesn’t Say a Word”: Violations and Reclamations of Intimacy

101 Chapter 4 “She Doesn’t Say a Word” Violations and Reclamations of Intimacy In the previous two chapters, I have dealt with the explicit benefits and implicit threats of disclosure in adolescent women’s interpersonal relationships; through portrayals of friendships and romantic relationships, I argue, narrative intimacy in contemporary American young adult literature acts as a model for measured disclosure, encouraging adolescent woman readers to consider the dangers of intimacy while actively engaging them in relationships that depend upon the narrator’s ability to fully disclose her thoughts and feelings. In this chapter, I shift to a consideration of how explicit violations of intimacy—namely, abuse and assault—challenge both narrators’ and readers’ concepts of narrative intimacy. Examining novels in which the narrator is either the victim of or a witness to such violations, I consider the ways in which narrators use narrative intimacy as a means of reclaiming an understanding of and control over intimacy. Instead of treating the reader as a partner and friend, then, the narrators in these texts primarily treat the reader as a therapist of sorts, relying on the implication of confidentiality in order to reclaim rather than model intimacy. In turn, this type of narrator-reader relationship reinforces concerns about the threats of intimacy because it is figured 102 Violations and Reclamations of Intimacy as the only safe space in which the narrator can reveal her thoughts and feelings without further vulnerability. The particular use of narrative intimacy in novels such as the ones discussed here signals a larger cultural concern about young women’s vulnerability to abuse and assault, which has markedly increased in recent years.1 Generally speaking, studies suggest that many adolescent peer relationships , particularly romantic and sexual relationships, involve some type or degree of abuse: nearly one quarter of teenagers report that they have experienced psychological, physical, or sexual abuse in a dating relationship (Noonan and Charles 1087). More specifically, according to recent studies, “between 9 percent and 12 percent of adolescents report being physically abused and 29 percent report being psychologically abused by dates in the previous year” (Foshee et al. 380). Assault, particularly rape, is also prevalent during adolescence. According to one study, “The greatest proportion of all reported rapes (32 percent) occurred between the ages of 11 and 17” (Raghavan et al. 225). In the face of such statistics, contemporary American culture has increasingly fixated on young women’s vulnerability to such threats. As Ruth O. Saxton notes, “The Girl in popular culture is an endangered species—in her own house as well as on the streets, vulnerable to rape, abuse, violence inflicted by others, and subject also to self-inflicted violence” (xxi). The violations of intimacy that are experienced by the narrators of the novels discussed in this chapter, therefore, reflect constructions of and concerns about the threats faced by adolescent women in America. Furthermore, the ways in which narrators relegate their confessions about their victimization draw attention to the increasing cultural awareness of a phenomenon that sociologists have labeled “second assault” and its relationship to victims’ fear of being abused by the very systems that are meant to protect them. Many young women who experience abuse or assault struggle with the question of how and to whom to report the trauma because they fear that they will be met by doubt or victim-blaming ; this response, or “second assault,” may cause victims to relive the pain, confusion, and shame that accompanied the initial assault. Studies have found that public health and safety officials (as well as family members and friends) may perpetrate second assault by responding to the report with some failure to recognize or affirm the victim status of the woman reporting the crime. In turn, as Courtney Ahrens notes in her article “Being Silenced: The Impact of Negative Social Reactions on the Disclosure of Rape,” many “women who initially break the silence and speak out Violations and Reclamations of Intimacy 103 about the assault may quickly reconsider their decision and opt to stop speaking” (264). In the face of possible second assault, then, many victims of trauma, abuse, or assault either silence themselves after one failed attempt to report their experience or may refrain altogether from any sort of confession or disclosure. In response both to concerns about abuse and assault and to the perceived likelihood that young women will struggle to...