| From the nineteenth century onward, adolescent characters have had important roles in American fiction. Until recently, however, historians and psychoanalysts, as well as literary critics, have ignored the particular expressions and experiences of the female during adolescence.;Before adolescence, animate and inanimate objects outside of the girl's self were catalysts for growth. In adolescence these objects become active inhibitors of development. Personal growth, the juncture of cognition and imagination implicit in D. W. Winnicott's "transitional object," suddenly is twisted into a cultural appropriation of self. Even the development of the body is regarded by girls as an unwelcome disruption that somehow occurs apart from the self. Before adolescence, girls owned the gaze and saw themselves reflected in one another. When their maturing bodies make them objects of the male gaze, girls feel as though their very selves are being overtaken.;This dissertation investigates these themes in a variety of contemporary short and long fiction and includes in-depth analyses of Paule Marshall's Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959), Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye (1970), and Bobbie Ann Mason's In Country (1985). These novels not only evince an awareness of the limitations placed on females but also a willfulness to exceed those limitations.;In adolescence, girls find themselves confronted with a mandated cultural agenda which urges them to relinquish the independence of their pre-adolescent years. The resulting conflict is expressed in the literature as a division between inside and outside, the home and the world beyond it, the body and the self. Consequently, adolescent girls long for the sense of wholeness offered by a renewed subjectivity. Moreover, despite changes in our society regarding opportunities for women, heroines created by contemporary women writers regard choices as false elements introduced to meet their presumed rather than true desires. |
