"Unshelter Me": The Emerging Fictional Adolescent Lesbian

Abstract

"Unshelter Me":The Emerging Fictional Adolescent Lesbian Vanessa Wayne Lee (bio) Terry Castle opens the fourth chapter of The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture with a discussion of how fictional representations of lesbianism have progressed from inconceivability to undertheorized reality (67). The point of contention for theorists, according to Castle, is determining what "lesbian fiction" is: who or what is represented and by whom? (67). Castle's theory of lesbian counterplotting offers a means for recognizing and evaluating adolescent lesbian fiction. This counterplot is an inversion of what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick sees as a triangle of male homosocial desire that connects male-female-male: "the bonding 'between' two men through, around, or over the body and soul of a woman" (68). According to Castle, the lesbian counterplot successfully subverts this triangle to depict "a female-male-female triangle, in which one of the male terms from the original triangle now occupies the in between or subjugated position of the mediator" (72, 74). The state of the counterplotting at the end of a novel determines whether it can be categorized as euphoric or dysphoric. If the female subversion maintains dominance through the end of a novel, Castle describes the counterplot as euphoric, but if the traditional male plot takes over, the novel is dysphoric. The lesbian novel of adolescence is part of Castle's dichotomy of probable lesbian plots, the other category being "novels of postmarital experience" (85). She claims that "the lesbian novel of adolescence is almost always dysphoric in tendency" (85). The texts that she specifies are texts written for and read primarily by adults: Dorothy Strachey's Olivia (1949), Jeanette Winterson's Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985), Antonia White's Frost in May (1933), and Christa Winsloe's The Child Manuela (1933). But while a close look at texts on lesbian themes written both about and for adolescents reveals plenty of dysphoric counterplots—such as Rosa Guy's Ruby (1976), which "depicts female homosexual desire as a finite phenomenon . . . a temporary phase in a larger pattern of heterosexual Bildung" (Castle 85)—it also reveals several euphoric counterplots that defy Castle's classification of the lesbian novel of adolescence.1 My analysis makes use of Castle's theories but requires a change in focus from viewing the "lesbian novel of adolescence" to viewing the adolescent novel of lesbianism. Of critical importance is how adolescent lesbian sexuality is articulated by adults for adolescents in popular literature and culture, because whether the adolescent reads for truth, experience, identification, or pleasure, she reads what the dominant culture deems publishable.2 I propose here a critical account of how authors have textually constructed specifically adolescent lesbian sexual identities. Although Castle sees two types of counterplots in adult lesbian fiction, when the focus is shifted to adolescent lesbian fiction I find three provisional groups, in which both dysphoric and euphoric plots surface. First are texts that position lesbianism as a threat or problem. As such, they do not attend to the formation of a lesbian identity but are designed to educate audiences unfamiliar or uncomfortable with lesbianism and/or to eroticize the lesbian as a facet of male heterosexual pleasure. Texts of this sort include Deborah Hautzig's teen novel Hey, Dollface (1978), Elizabeth Levy's pre-teen novel Come Out Smiling (1981), and Juan Jose Campanula's made-for-cable family special More Than Friends: The Coming Out of Heidi Lieter (1995). The second type of text focuses on the formation of lesbian identities.3 The lesbian identities represented in each text vary in depth, endurance, and scope. The texts best representing this category are Sandra Scoppettone's Happy Endings Are All Alike (1978), Nancy Garden's Annie On My Mind (1982) and Good Moon Rising (1996), and Maria Maggenti's film The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love (1995). Texts in the third category interrogate received wisdom about lesbianism and lesbian identity. Whereas texts in the first and second categories isolate and magnify the issue of lesbianism in their plots, the texts in the final category represent lesbianism with less clarity. Stacey Donovan's book Dive (1996) portrays adolescence as complicated and does not presume that...