Psychoanalytic Transference and Redemption in Anne Fine’s The Tulip Touch and Anne Cassidy’s Jennifer Jones Novels

Abstract

Psychoanalytic Transference and Redemption in Anne Fine’s The Tulip Touch and Anne Cassidy’s Jennifer Jones Novels Chen-Wei Yu (bio) Introduction Anne Fine’s The Tulip Touch (1996), Anne Cassidy’s Looking for JJ (2004), and the sequel to the latter, Finding Jennifer Jones (2014), are inspired by the same social event and its aftermath: they were written in response to the British media and public’s reactions toward the trial of two ten-year-old boys who abducted and killed a toddler named James Bulger in 1993. During the time of the trial, it emerged that the offenders came from abusive families. But the tragic death of the victim provoked such a strong public outcry against them that “complex matters about the boys, their lives and experiences, about the roots of the killing, and the intricacies of social and structural influences were drowned in an outpouring of adult condemnation” (Haydon and Scraton 422–23). According to Elizabeth O’Reilly, Fine “was horrified by the media’s reaction to the two boys,” so she wrote The Tulip Touch (“Anne Fine”). The novel’s narrator, a girl named Natalie, tells of her friendship with another girl named Tulip, whom Fine “creates” to be “a ‘realistic’ product of abuse, exhibiting disturbed and sickening behavior,” and “yet Tulip is always shown to be a victim of her environment” (O’Reilly, “Anne Fine”). As time passes, Tulip’s juvenile delinquency gradually escalates into dangerously antisocial behavior. In Cassidy’s Looking for JJ, the protagonist Jennifer tries to begin a new life with a new identity of Alice after ten years in juvenile detention, but she is haunted by her past, when, as a ten-year-old from a dysfunctional family, she killed her friend Michelle. O’Reilly notes that, like Fine, Cassidy equally “felt strongly about the media’s demonizing of [End Page 296] Bulger’s killers, and both [authors] depict child characters who are severely troubled and in need of help” (“Anne Cassidy”). So Cassidy’s novel gives a portrayal of the media and public’s reaction to Jennifer’s crime as “the harsh, unforgiving attitude . . . reflective of what actually happened in the Bulger case” (O’Reilly, “Anne Cassidy”). Both authors reveal the reasons behind their characters’ misdeeds, calling for an understanding of Bulger’s offenders not as evil, but as psychologically damaged children. Without a contextually contingent understanding of the offenders, the public tends to perceive them as unforgivable. In his book As If, documenting the trial of the offenders, Blake Morrison criticizes the unforgiving social atmosphere of the time as “inhuman and despairing” and comments: “Only a culture without hope cannot forgive. . . . Have we so little faith in ourselves we can’t accept the possibility of maturation, change, cure? Have we so little faith in children?” (205). From this perspective, I view Fine’s and Cassidy’s novels as social critiques to advocate faith in the resilience of children. In Fine’s novel, Natalie is a case for social sympathy and child resilience, which agrees with what Fine describes as the book’s message in a Booklist interview: “things are this bad, but you yourself can make the decision both to go forward and make something of your own life and also to hold sympathy and responsibility for the ones that fall” (Rochman). The other protagonist, Tulip, who does not achieve a desirable transformation in the end, seems to be the counterexample of child resilience. But Tulip’s characterization reminds us that it is necessary to take individual differences into consideration when discussing a person’s reform, because her situation is portrayed as extremely difficult compared to Natalie’s, so it can be speculated that she needs more than what is available to Natalie. This is consistent with another message that the novel has been widely accepted to deliver: how it “harshly condemns both the attitudes of individuals and the social and legal systems which prevent Tulip getting the help she needs” (O’Reilly, “Anne Fine”). Therefore, in this study, I choose to focus on Fine’s and Cassidy’s respective protagonists, Natalie and Jennifer, to demonstrate that their characterization implicitly consists of a representation of the unconscious processes...