"Like Falling Up into a Storybook": Trauma and Intertextual Repetition in Laurie Halse Anderson's Speak

Abstract

© 2010 Children’s Literature Association. Pp. 395–414. If, as Roberta Seelinger Trites suggests, children’s literature tends to “delegitimize adolescents” (83) by perpetuating an ideology that “directs power away from adolescents and towards adults” (81), then such power redirections are especially acute in the young adult genre. Concurring with Mike Cadden’s assertion that novels “constructed by adults to simulate an authentic adolescent’s voice are inherently ironic because the so-called adolescent voice is never—and never can be—truly authentic” (146), Chris McGee remarks that any study of the young adult genre should lead us to ask “who young adult novels are written for, what fantasies they fulfill, and what purposes their ‘authentic’ narrative voices serve” (172; emphasis in the original). This concern about authenticity is further exacerbated in popular young adult trauma fiction, 1 which offers the adolescent reader identification with a suffering protagonist and yet also presumes that reader’s simultaneous coping ability, a curious duality of reader response that may constitute the disturbing transference of an adult desire onto an “innocent” expected to exhibit both vulnerability and strength, to evince victimization while modeling recovery. More generally, the writing of trauma fiction by adults for younger readers has come to be regarded by some scholars as ideologically problematic. 2 Katharine Capshaw Smith, noting how “childhood is a particularly potent site for imagining the ubiquitous traumatized subject” (118), wonders if our offering young people stories that chronicle pain is not the displaced manifestation of a need for adult reassurance. Smith expresses concern that the “dualistic depiction” of the traumatized child in such fiction serves mainly to allay adult anxieties: “If the child is victim, she must turn to adults; if the child is savior, she surpasses adults and her core values—her core identity—remain safe and somewhat untouched by the historical event” (117). Regardless of whether the child is represented as victim or savior, the adult (reader or writer) will in due course be “reassured about the damage that trauma can do to the ‘innocent’ child” (117). Smith is