Declarations of Independence: Empowered Girls in Young Adult Literature, 1990-20012 (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Declarations of Independence: Empowered Girls in Young Adult Literature, 1990-20012 Lissa Paul (bio) Declarations of Independence: Empowered Girls in Young Adult Literature, 1990-20012. By Joanne Brown and Nancy St. Clair. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2002 It is always a struggle to focus on what the book does, rather than what it doesn't do, or what as a reviewer, I would have liked it to have done. Declarations of Independence: Empowered Girls in Young Adult Literature 1990-2001 does what it says it does. It provides a checklist of books with girls who at one time might have been described as spunky heroines (a term favored by older generations of critics), but who are described here as "empowered" by the authors, Joanne Brown and Nancy St. Clair. Careful and narrowly explicit in their definitions, the authors acknowledge that because adolescent fiction generally is about "autonomy or self-reliance," definitions of "empowered girls" must be scrupulously explicit (26). As a general backdrop for their definitions of empowerment, Brown and St. Clair appear to like The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development, an edited collection of good, but oldish (1983) essays. Empowered girls, say Brown and St. Clair, are those who "find strength by valuing positive feminine characteristics instead of striving to be competitive, assertive and powerful," and those who gain "confidence in themselves" rather than "power over others" (27). The book then proceeds to examine these characteristics in the female protagonists of Young Adult (YA) books published since 1990. The chapters tidily classify the novels by genre: historical fiction, contemporary world, literature of the fantastic, and memoir. Each chapter then provides a brief introduction outlining particular characteristics of the genre (social realism in the chapter on contemporary literature, science fiction in the chapter on literature of the fantastic), then proceeds into extensive plot summaries of selected texts, tipping toward analysis in terms of empowerment. Each chapter also contains an additional bibliography with suggestions for further reading. That's what is in the book. If you are a teacher of children in middle school, or perhaps high school, then you will probably find Declarations of Independence useful. It will give you access to books you might want to have in your classroom, books that are likely to conform to your school district guidelines advocating positive female role-models or gender equity in books selected for use in language arts programs. You will also have access to some theoretical material on feminist theory, though it tends to be classic-Carolyn Heilbrun's Reinventing Womanhood (1979), for example, or Carol Gilligan's In a Different Voice (1982)-but dated. In the interests of full disclosure, it is probably worth saying that an early and still frequently cited article of mine, "Enigma Variations" (1987), is referred to here, too, but the authors would have found that I'd developed a more nuanced version of feminist criticism in Reading Otherways (1998)-and I wish they had turned to that instead. And although the authors do cite one recent critical book on feminist theory and children's literature, Waking Sleeping Beauty: Feminist Voices in Children's Literature, they don't convey its theoretical insight or energy. The version of feminist theory advocated in Declarations of Independence feels out of fashion, even dowdy, in the context of literary criticism as worn in university English departments, but it is exactly the kind of simplistic approach that suits the style of Education faculties as well as provincial or state departments of education. The term "empowerment" is itself the giveaway, insisting as it does on action over both passivity and passion. Like it or not, empowerment defines itself as a "male-order" term, one that, despite claims to the contrary, highlights the value of being on top and in control-and so only tends to reinscribe the privileging of a masculine obsession with power. Attention concentrated on power as a basic tenet of feminist theory was abandoned by feminist scholars long ago in favor of something more varied, more fluid, more negotiated. As a reviewer, I know I'm now moving into awkward territory, because I'm shifting the discussion from [End Page 170] what the authors have...