Love Them and Lose Them, Then Move On

Central to Eric Tribunella’s Melancholia and Maturation are the questions of what it means to be an adult, and what process the child must experience to transcend into adulthood. In his text, Tribunella examines what he identifies as a particular rising thematic trend in American children’s literature from the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: the maturation process that propels the child into adulthood is increasingly catalyzed by the traumatic loss of a desperately loved individual or object. It is this loss, says Tribunella, which “generates the escape velocity of youth” (xi). His project, then, is to “explore” why this particular narrative recurs so often, and to “consider what we can learn about children and childhood by studying what these narratives mean and how they work” (xi). To accomplish this, Tribunella has “situated” his exploration “at the intersection of children’s literature, queer theory, and trauma studies” (xii). Drawing extensively from Freud and Judith Butler, especially in the earlier chapters, the psychoanalytic concept of melancholic identity—the melancholic process by which that which is lost is yet retained through an interpolation of some of the lost object’s essence into the individual’s unconscious, thus allowing both the trauma of the loss and what is actually lost to become a part of that individual—becomes essential to Tribunella’s understanding of the maturation process. Indeed, the unifying connective tissue throughout the body of his text is that each lesson or path toward maturation which he explores in the individual chapters is achieved not in the actual loss of the loved object, but in its incorporation.

Especially crucial to Tribunella’s argument is his assertion that traumatic loss functions as a sacrifice, which he identifies as “critical to the formation of the disciplined and mature citizen” (xiv). Equally significant are his working constructions of the child and the adult, which are extracted from patterns he sees within American children’s maturation literature and which are thus representative of current American sociocultural characteristics of both. Extrapolating key qualities he sees represented in the final characterization of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s young protagonist Jody in The Yearling, Tribunella establishes a set of qualities as hallmarks of maturity, the possession of which socially identifies one as an adult. The mature adult is sober, responsible, knowing, experienced, law abiding, hard-working, and heteronormatively gendered (xx–xxii). Antipodal to the adult is the child, who lacks these qualities and stricter definitions; the goal of the melancholic maturation trope, argues Tribunella, is to develop the child figure into the adult, and to bring the child reader along for the experience.

In his first chapter, “Losing and Using Queer Youth,” Tribunella identifies queerness as the beloved object most often sacrificed in order to “[escape] the gravitational force of childhood” (xi). Primarily focusing on John Knowles’s A Separate Peace and Katherine Paterson’s Bridge to Terabithia, he argues that it is the loss of a beloved and queer friend which initiates the development into social conformity; essentially, this friend must die in order “to effect the melancholic maturation of the survivor” (5). Same-sex affection and queerness are opposed to the sociocultural promoted ideal of the heteronormative adult; thus, Knowles’s Finny, “surely, the queerest of the Devon boys,” sacrifices himself not for “spiritual salvation” but because “that sacrifice purchases Gene’s heterosexual manhood” (13). Chapter two, “A Boy and His Dog,” functions in much the same manner, identifying a child’s affection for his canine companion as a “proto-sexual” substitute for adult heterosexual love. Serving as a transitional love object between parental love and adult heterosexual love, Tribunella argues, attachment to a beloved anthropomorphized animal allows the child to “practice engaging in the complex sexualized relations of later life” (46). The loss of this animal then propels the character, and by extension the reader, toward socially acceptable heterosexual adult love.

Turning to an exploration of S. E. Hinton’s The Outsiders and That Was Then, This Is...