Social Convention and Adolescence - Book Report/Review Example

Samantha Charlton Adolescence and Writing Degree Essay 14 May 2007 "If we stray from the confines of social convention, we begin to see that the distinctions between childhood, adulthood and adolescence are fragile and permeable". Discuss with reference to 'The Lovely Bones' by Alice Sebold and 'The Cement Garden' by Ian McEwan Social convention has always demanded the periods of childhood and adolescence be a time of innocence and as such most parents attempt to shield their children from the harsher realities of life. A child who thinks or behaves like an adult, worries teachers and parents alike. We know, instinctively, that exposing a young human to traumatic or disturbing events can cause damage later on. However, more often than not, we are aware that the minds of children and teenagers are not as credulous and earnest as we would like to believe. Television, the Internet, text messaging, websites like myspace.com, and a bombardment of information, most of it from popular culture, affect a child from an early age. The distinctions between childhood, adolescence and adulthood are indeed fragile and permeable. In fact, they have always been. We should not fall into the trap of believing this loss of innocence is a modern phenomenon. Bullying has always existed and one has only to read Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist (1838) to understand how children have suffered and have been exploited in the past. Some nave children are forced by circumstance to grow world-weary all too soon while others are born into a sheltered environment of privilege and, despite having no reason to do so, are able to use and manipulate others from an early age. In my opinion, two factors play an important role in the speed and manner in which a human moves from childhood, through adolescence to adulthood: circumstance and character. The main difference between and the states of adulthood and childhood are life experience and the maturation of the human brain; and this is what makes the distinction between these two states so permeable and fragile. Traditionally, childhood used to be written about in romanticised terms. George Eliot once wrote: "They had entered the thorny wilderness, and the golden gates of childhood had forever closed behind them".1 Indeed, when childhood is thought of in this way, people are led to believe that childhood is a transient, idealistic period of life with children incapable of comprehending, let alone committing, atrocities. Two novels which challenge this viewpoint are: The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold and The Cement Garden by Ian McEwan. The characters of Susie and Jack epitomize what happens when innocence is lost in the harshest of ways. However, the distinct difference between the two is that while Susie is murdered, therefore having the role of observer (although she influences the future of everyone) for the remainder of the novel, Jack is an active protagonist who must react to situations, make decisions and act on them. Both novels can have a chilling affect on the reader as they describe horrific situations in detail. As one reads, we are constantly fighting against our conditioning that children should not speak of such things. The authors, Sebold and McEwan, both push the boundaries, and reveal how children, or this case, adolescents, react in such situations. Both novels are told in the first person narrative. This is a device used when the author wants the primary focus to be on one protagonist. Historically, this use of first person narrative can be seen in Dickens's Oliver Twist, David Copperfield and Great Expectations and Charlotte Bront's Jane Eyre. It creates an intimate story with everything filtered through the eyes of the main character. What comes through strongly in The Lovely Bones and The Cement Garden is that although the differences between adolescence and adulthood are in many ways subtle, especially physically, an adolescent does see the world differently from an adult. There is a matter of fact way in which Susie and Jack recount their stories which distinctly marks them as teenagers - adding to the reader's sense of horror at what Susie and Jack describe. In The Lovely Bones, Susie Salmon is fourteen years old when she is murdered by her neighbour, Mr. Harvey. She is already dead when the story begins and the opening chapter describes her murder in minute detail. It is a chilling episode, made even more so by Susie's succinct story-telling. When in mortal danger, Susie's immaturity is revealed. Although her instincts warn her of Mr Harvey, she follows him into his hole because she is still at an age where you do what adults tell you: "I was cold, but the natural authority of his age, and the added fact that he was a neighbour and had talked to my father about fertilizer, rooted me to the spot". (Sebold, 2) Once Mr Harvey attacks her, fear turns her into a child again: "Please," I said. "Don't," I said. Sometimes I combined them. "Please don't" or "Don't please." It was like insisting that a key works when it doesn't or yelling "I've got it, I've got it, I've got it" as a softball goes sailing over you into the stands. (Sebold, 6) Susie had grown up in a safe, loving family and, like most teenagers, had a false sense of her understanding of the adult world. Her life was school and friends. However, Susie was an intelligent, articulate young woman. Contrary to what most adults would like to believe, adolescents are adept at knowing when an adult is lying to them. When Mr Harvey tells her he built the hole as a clubhouse for the kids in the neighbourhood, Susie immediately spots the lie: "I don't think I believed this even then. I thought he was lying, but I thought it was a pitiful lie. I imagined he was lonely. We had read about men like him in health class. Men who never married and ate frozen meals every night and were so afraid of rejection that they didn't even own pets. I felt sorry for him". (Sebold, 4) At fourteen, Susie is physically maturing and is also learning to express herself as an individual. She puts a quote on non-conformity from the Spanish poet Juan Raman Jimanez in her year book. "I chose it both because it expressed my contempt for my structured surroundings a la the classroom and because, not being some dopey quote from a rock group, I thought it marked me as literary". (Sebold, 1) This is a natural stage of growing up but it can make teenagers vulnerable, as it did Susie, for in feeling like she was already in adult she put to much trust in her own decisions, failing to realise that not everyone in the world had her best interests at heart; thus her fatal decision to follow Mr Harvey into his hole. Jack, the protagonist of Ian McEwan's The Cement Garden is a very different character to Susie. He is an insecure fourteen-year old with an incestuous relationship with his sisters and buried resentment towards his parents. The resentment he feels towards his father before his death is revealed as guilt afterwards with the first sentence of the novel: "I did not kill my father, but I sometimes I think that I helped him on his way". (McEwan, 13) In many ways his moodiness, obsessive masturbation and callowness are indicative of a lot of teenage boys but Jack's tendencies have a darker side. Unlike Susie, who had a happy home life, Jack was a lonely obsessive before his parents' death. He lusts after his two sisters, the elder, Julie, especially. The siblings lock themselves into their bedroom at the beginning of the novel to play 'pretend' doctor, nurse and patient. Jack is cripplingly insecure. On the day of his father's death, when the workers arrive to deliver the cement he feels embarrassed to be caught reading a comic, rather than a newspaper or football results. Jack wants to affect the right behaviour but only ends up making a fool of himself: I hooked my thumbs into my pockets, moved my weight onto one foot and narrowed my eyes a little. I wanted to say something terse and appropriate, but I was not sure I heard them right. I left it too long, for the one who had spoke rolled his eyes toward the sky and with his hands on his hips stared past me at the front door. (McEwan, 13-14) Jack's insecurity is linked to a desperate need to belong. He watches his father dealing with the cement delivery and wants to be part of this distinctly male environment: "I did not know what the cement was for, and I did not wish to be placed outside this intense community of work by showing ignorance." (McEwan, 14) Despite wanting to belong, Jack is no longer at an age where he hero-worships his father, as young most boys do. He notes with derision how 'self-important and foolish' his father looks while arguing with his mother over the sacks of cement. (McEwan, 14) Jack is rapidly made an orphan. His father dies while cementing the back garden and soon afterwards his mother succumbs to cancer. Already an awkward, self-absorbed adolescent, Jack is unprepared for his parents' deaths, and neither are his sisters. With an absence of an adult figure to guide them, they make the decision to bury their mother under cement in the cellar in order to avoid being put into care. This triggers a chain reaction of events whereby, free of adult control, the children are "incapable of giving any proper structure to their existence".2 The Cement Garden is about how difficult situations make a teenager both grow into an adult and regress back into childhood when the pressures get too much. Like Susie, Jack is unprepared for the situation he finds himself in. McEwan's work is disturbing because like William Golding's Lord of the Flies (1954) he shows what can happen when children/adolescents are left to their own devices without adult supervision and guidance. Jack's attraction for his sister Julie has no one to check it now his parents are gone. In her work Sex and Sexuality in Ian McEwan's Work, Christina Byrnes argues that McEwan's treatment of sex makes a valuable comment on society as a whole, holding a mirror up to our most taboo of subjects: incest.3 The four siblings: Jack, Julie, Sue and Tom are all at various stages of sexual and psychological development and McEwan explores the relationship they have with each other and, ultimately, with themselves. In her essay Ian McEwan - pornographer or prophet, Byrnes states that The Cement Garden was set in a background of ongoing, long-term relationships where we can appreciate the conditions that facilitate the acts of perversion which take place.4 The boundaries between adolescence and adulthood are highly fragile and permeable when it comes to sexuality, for although adolescence technically ends at nineteen, girls and boys become sexually mature in their early teens. This sexual maturity contrasts with the lack of emotional maturity - and combining the two can end in disaster. In conclusion, The Lovely Bones and The Cement Garden both open a window on a shadowy world where a teenager, who has not yet gained wisdom and self knowledge, is thrown into a situation where they must face the darkest sides of sexuality and fear. The experience is so extreme that it causes a regression back into childhood and a sense of apathy or denial. In order to heighten this effect, Sebold and McEwan use the first person narrative. Historically used in novels wanting to give a child's point of view, this narrative enables the writer to filter all experiences through Susie and Jack's perspectives. Thus we view rape, murder, death and incest through the eyes of an individual, rather than described in a more stereotypical fashion. The distinctions between childhood, adulthood and adolescence are indeed fragile and permeable for us all. The regression back to a childlike state in the face of tragedy, extreme stress or fear is not limited just to adolescents but to adults as well. The maturation process is not linear and in adults, psychological, intellectual or sexual maturation can be retarded by a number of factors. To illustrate this, I leave you with the words of Anais Nin: We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.5 Works Cited Primary Sources McEwan, Ian, 1994, The Cement Garden, Anchor 1st Vintage International Ed. edition. Sebold, Alice, 2002, The Lovely Bones, Back Bay Books. Secondary Sources Byrnes, Christina, 1995, Ian McEwan - Pornographer or Prophet, Contemporary Review. Byrnes, Christina, 1995, Sex and Sexuality in Ian McEwan's Work, Paupers' Press. ELIOT G., 1860, The Mill On the Floss, Penguin, Harmondswoth, p.270, 1985 edition. Williams, Christopher, 1993, Ian McEwan's THE CEMENT GARDEN and the Tradition of the Child/Adolescent as I-Narrator', Extract from Le Trasformazioni del Narrare, p.9, Brindisi, Schena Editore. Read More