Memory and Its Representation in Adolescent Literature: the Interactions between Myth and the Adolescent Presented in Alan Garner’s The Owl Service

Abstract

In British society after the Second World War, it was important to remember the past which was considered to be a significant heritage for contemporary British people. British children’s books often dealt with the concept of “heritage” related to local myths from small villages. Alan Garner, one of the major British children’s fantasy writers of the second-half of the 20th century, particularly focused on those local myths which he believed are a key means of shedding light on modern British society. To Garner, the heritage of the past still lives in the present. The Owl Service embodies his idea of the dynamic interactions between the past and the present, and those between myth and human life. This book, which is about the triangular love relationship among teenagers in a small Welsh village, suggests that those teenagers’ personal relationships repeat the mythical relationship among the three people in a Middle-Age Welsh story, The Mabinogion, and also the common conflicts such as possessive love, jealousy, revenge, and class division. In particular, while representing this idea of myth, the adolescent characters play dual roles to summon the hidden dangers of a mysterious Middle-Age myth, but also manage to free themselves from the repeated cycle of the tragic conclusion and create the possibility of a new myth.