Abstracts Melissa Juvinall
Illinois State UniversityA Quest for Identities: Subjectivity in Creech’s Novels for Girls
Issues of agency, voice, and community (especially the mother/daughter relationship) are important in evaluating feminist children’s literature. Contemporary fiction writer Sharon Creech engages these concepts through four young-adult novels, all with thirteen-year-old female protagonists. The books, though separate and complete in themselves, call for an ideological comparison because they share a similar place and time and the characters know each other. However, rather than lumping all the female characters into one complete novel, Creech allows the characters to express themselves as independent from others as they realize their independence. The girls gain agency through writing (realizing their subjectivity in the process), reading books such as Homer’s The Odyssey, discovering the implications of their names, and opening their perspective in order to be a contributing part of their worlds. Their voices emerge triumphant midst families that attempt to silence them. Creech shows the problems of society’s expectations of motherhood with her successful and unsuccessful mothers and their importance to youth. She also uses the nested narrative, an embedded narrative that reproduces motherhood both thematically and structurally, in order to give the protagonists a sense of power in their ‘fertility.’ Mary Lou Finney in Absolutely Normal Chaos, Salamanca Tree Hiddle in Walk Two Moons, Zinnia Taylor in Chasing Redbird, and Domenica Santolina Doone in Bloomability all struggle to find their feminist voices and identities among mixed up families. Creech shows her belief in the condition of adolescence as primarily one of development of self.