"For Adults Only? Searching for Subjectivity in Phyllis Reynolds Naylor's Alice Series"

Abstract

For Adults Only? Searching for Subjectivity in Phyllis Reynolds Naylor's Alice Series" Caroline Jones (bio) The election, in 1980, of social and political conservative Ronald Reagan to the presidency of the United States signified a change in the societal mores of sexual leniency of the 1970s. Alarmed not just by that leniency, but also by the increasing incidents of AIDS, social and religious conservatives, as well as many liberals and moderates (including flower children of the Sixties who were by now settling down and having children of their own), sought a middle ground from which to confront a future laden with potentially devastating consequences to sexual behavior than their own ever had been. Extreme social conservatives looked longingly back to the moralities espoused by the patriarchal value system of the 1950s, a system which, according to John D'Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, "had never fully died" (345). Discussions of sexual desire radically diminished in sex education classrooms, though they thrived among teens themselves (Rollin 289). D'Emilio and Freedman characterize the renewed purity movement thus: Reacting to the gains of both feminism and gay liberation, and distressed by the visibility of the erotic in American culture, sexual conservatives sought the restoration of "traditional" values. In its rhetoric, this contemporary breed of purity advocates echoed its predecessors by attributing to sex the power to corrupt, even to weaken fatally, American society. . . . It plunged directly into politics, as religious fundamentalists joined forces with political conservatives to make the Republican party the vehicle for a powerful moral crusade. (345) Sex education courses taught students about anatomy and failed to address sexuality in any terms beyond the reproductive, and discussions of contraception were limited. Judith Levine describes the hallmark Reagan-era legislation on federally funded sex education, the 1981 Adolescent Family Life Act (AFLA), as determined to [End Page 16] stop teen sex by deploying nothing more than propaganda. AFLA would fund school and community programs "to promote self-discipline and other prudent approaches" to adolescent sex . . . . For young people's sexual autonomy and safety [the new law] was a great blow. (90–91) As Levine recognizes, policies such as AFLA gravely underestimated the power of young adults' emotions, desires, curiosity, and senses of self-determination. Of course, politics and school administrations operate on a very different level from the media and culture received and enacted by preteens and teenagers. Their movies, television, music, and magazines all offered very different, very open depictions of sexuality. Cultural rebellions in teen identity—particularly clothing, music, film, and dance—were reminiscent of the 1950s, with teens challenging their parents' values and sensibilities with their own perceptions of and responses to the world1 . Into these social and political scenarios enters Phyllis Reynolds Naylor's series about Alice McKinley, introduced in 1985 with The Agony of Alice. The series, begun in the eighties, but more fully developed in the nineties, embraces the values of sexual knowledge and autonomy of the 1970s, acknowledges the renewed sexual conservatism of the 1980s, and epitomizes their uneasy coexistence in the 1990s. While the social ideologies underlying her Alice books reinforce approved societal norms of behavior for girls and young women, Naylor raises questions of female sexual desire more overtly and explicitly than most authors writing for her audience (primarily girls aged 9–14). The individual books and the series as a whole are rich with conflicting impulses and tensions. While she maintains some very traditional assumptions and paradigms about sex (particularly that it remain between two consenting adults, generally supposed to be of opposite genders and married), Naylor is also quite progressive and forward thinking about girls and their sexual subjectivity. She condones what Levine calls "clean sex," that is, "the sex that occurs in committed, preferably legally sanctioned, age-of-majority, heterosexual, reproductive relationships," only occasionally addressing Levine's "[d]irty sex [which] is all the rest" (9). In keeping with the sensibilities about clean sex, particularly the "age-of-majority" component thereof, Naylor has created a pre-adolescent and adolescent female protagonist who has, along with an ongoing quest for her own identity, a general curiosity about and interest in sex and the female body, but who, for...