Literary Conceptualizations of Growth

Children’s Literature, Culture, and Cognition (CLCC)

The overarching aim of the CLCC series is to promote new theoretical approaches in
the realm of children’s literature research on the one hand, and to emphasize a non-
Anglo-American focus, bringing in exciting research from other areas, on the other
hand. In addition, the new book series will present research from many linguistic areas
to an international audience, reinforce interaction between research conducted in many
different languages and present high standard research on the basis of secondary sources
in a number of languages and based in a variety of research traditions. Basically the
series should encourage a cross- and interdisciplinary approach on the basis of literary
studies, media studies, comparative studies, reception studies, literacy studies, cognitive
studies, and linguistics. The series includes monographs and essay collections which
are international in scope and intend to stimulate innovative research with a focus
on children’s literature (including other media), children’s culture and cognition, thus
encouraging interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research in this expanding field.
For an overview of all books published in this series, please see
http://benjamins.com/catalog/clcc

Editors
Nina Christensen Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer
Aarhus University University of Tübingen
Elina Druker Maria Nikolajeva
Stockholm University University of Cambridge

Editorial Board
Sandra Beckett Kenneth Kidd Karen Sanchez-Eppler Astrid Surmatz
Brock University University of Florida Amherst College University of Amsterdam
Karen Coats Maria Lassén-Seger Lisa Sainsbury Kestutis Urba
Illinois State University Åbo Academy Roehampton University Vilnius University
Nina Goga Jörg Meibauer Cecilia Silva-Díaz David Whitley
University College Bergen University of Mainz Autonomous University University of Cambridge
Vanessa Joosen Katharina J. Rohlfing of Barcelona
University of Antwerp University of Bielefeld

Volume 2
Literary Conceptualizations of Growth. Metaphors and cognition in adolescent
literature
by Roberta Trites
Literary Conceptualizations
of Growth
Metaphors and cognition in adolescent literature

Roberta Trites
Illinois State University

John Benjamins Publishing Company

Amsterdam / Philadelphia
 TM
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
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the American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence

of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Trites, Roberta Seelinger, 1962-

Literary Conceptualizations of Growth : Metaphors and cognition in adolescent literature
/ Roberta Seelinger Trites.
p. cm. (Children’s Literature, Culture, and Cognition, issn 2212-9006 ; v. 2)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Discourse analysis, Literary. 2. Literature--Psychology. 3. Psychology and literature.
4. Metaphor. 5. Cognition. I. Title.
P302.5.T75 2014
809’.89283--dc23 2014011669
isbn 978 90 272 0156 0 (Hb ; alk. paper)
isbn 978 90 272 6996 6 (Eb)

© 2014 – John Benjamins B.V.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any
other means, without written permission from the publisher.
John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands
John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa
 I dedicate this book to all of my Ph.D. students,
without whom this work would not have been possible.
 Table of contents

Introduction 1
Cognitive linguistics   2
Brain science   5
Growth   7
Acknowledgements   9

Chapter 1
Growth, cognitive linguistics, and embodied metaphors 11
Background and review of the literature   11
Cognitive linguistics and embodied metaphors   14
Embodied metaphors of growth in literary criticism   20
Fiction as an example: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn   28
Conclusion   32

Chapter 2
Sequences, scripts, and stereotypical knowledge 35
Sequences, scripts, and stereotypical knowledge   36
Scripts and stereotypical knowledge in American Born Chinese   40
Memory, perception, emotion and Margaret Mahy’s Memory   42
Causality, scripts, and Thirteen Reasons Why   46
Conclusion   53

Chapter 3 55
Blending and cultural narratives 55
Blending   56
Blending in a cool moonlight   57
Cultural narratives as cognitive blends   59
Cultural narratives and embodied metaphors in Shusterman’s Unwind   63
Primary and complex metaphors, blending, and cultural narratives in
Njunjul the Sun   71
Conclusion   78
viii Literary Conceptualizations of Growth

Chapter 4
A case study: Cultural narratives and the “Pixar Maturity Formula” 81
Maturity and causality   83
The Pixar maturity formula   85
Up and Being-towards-death   88
Toy Story 3, separation anxiety, and control   90
Conclusion   94

Chapter 5
Epistemology, ontology, and the philosophy of experientialism 97
Embodied reason in David Almond’s novels   99
The cognitive unconscious and metaphorical thought   102
The ontology and epistemology of racial construction   108
Categorization, and epistemology: The Absolutely True Diary of
a Part-Time Indian   112
The ontology of racism: 47   116
Conclusion   118

Chapter 6
The hegemony of growth in adolescent literature 123
Growth: The archaeology of a metaphor   124
Growth and its historical conceptualizations   126
The implications of growth metaphors   133
A historiography of growth metaphors   134
Growth and the historiography of literature for youth   138

Afterword 147
References 149
Index 159
 Introduction

Why is growth such a prevalent concept in adolescent literature? This project,

Literary Conceptualizations of Growth: Metaphor and Cognition in Adolescent
Literature, grew out of questions about adolescent maturation left unanswered in
my earlier work on adolescent literature. In Disturbing the Universe: Power and
Repression in Adolescent Literature, I argue that adolescent literature isn’t as much
about growth as it is about teaching adolescents either to conform to societal pres-
sures or die (Trites 2000). That is, although characters like Holden Caulfield ini-
tially appear to be iconoclasts and rebels who refuse to conform, by the end of most
novels about adolescents — including Catcher in the Rye — the rebellious protago-
nist has either “matured” into some level of conformity or has died. (Two characters
in S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders, Johnny and Dallas, provide examples of the latter
case.) In other words, adolescent literature initially appears to empower teenagers,
but empowerment proves to be something of an illusion in many novels because so
frequently, teenaged characters demonstrate to teen readers that the only true form
of empowerment comes from growing up and leaving adolescence behind. It’s cer-
tainly logical that we must all mature, but the message to young readers is a consis-
tent one: “there is something wrong with your subject position as a teenager. Grow
up and become someone else.” In that sense, adolescent literature is the only genre
written with the subversive ideological intent of undermining the reader’s subject
position. (As a counter-example, think of women’s literature — which certainly is
not written for the purpose of teaching women how to outgrow being women!)
But in Disturbing the Universe, I did not ask the question why? That is, why
do authors focus stories so frequently on adolescent characters who grow? And
why do literary critics spend so much time analyzing that growth — frequent-
ly relying themselves on metaphors of growth in their own analyses? Literary
Conceptualizations of Growth posits that perhaps our own cognitive structures are
responsible for the pervasiveness of growth as both a metaphor and a narrative
pattern in adolescent literature. The purpose of this book is therefore not to de-
fine adolescent literature or examine the Young Adult (YA) novel as a genre; that
work has been undertaken by, among others, Nikolajeva (1996, 2000), McCallum
(1999), Cadden (2000), Trites (2000, 2007), Coats (2004), and Waller (2009).
Rather, the purpose of this book is to examine how growth is conceptualized in
literature and in literary criticism. In order to understand the cause(s) and effect(s)
2 Literary Conceptualizations of Growth

of these conceptualizations, I rely on one of the disciplines that analyzes conceptu-

alization as a cognitive process: cognitive linguistics.

Cognitive linguistics

Cognitive linguistics emerged from the broad interdisciplinary movement in cog-

nitive science begun in the 1950s that involved scholars who employed methodolo-
gies from psychology, linguistics, computer science, anthropology, and philosophy
as a way of better understanding cognition. The earliest cognitive scientists were
reacting against behaviorists, who tended to dominate some fields of psychology
in the 1950s with their assumptions that all behaviors are learned, but too much
about unconscious thought, instinctive behaviors, and the nature of consciousness
itself were left unanswered by behaviorism. Cognitive scientists strove to explore
all aspects of thought, not just those that were influenced by learned behaviors.
Initially, these early cognitive scientists argued that brains were like computers,
so they believed that if they could understand the brain’s coding, they could un-
derstand cognition; eventually, however, they acknowledged this analogy to be
flawed. Brains are living, mutable, and infinitely complex; they are not coded in
binary systems like computers are. Therefore, “today’s cognitive scientists tend
to concentrate instead on the more organic metaphor the ‘embodiment’ of mind,
that is, of the mind’s substantive indebtedness to its bodily, social and cultural
contexts” (Hart 2001: 315). Moreover, cognitive scientists, and especially those
in the subdiscipline of cognitive linguistics, examine how language usage affects
our thinking. Cognitive linguists focus, among other things, “on the figurative
phenomena of metaphor, metonymy, image schemata, ‘fields,’ ‘frames,’ and other
‘integrative mental spaces’ (as they are called), and the gradient structures and
prototypical bases of semantic categories, all of which contribute to recasting hu-
man reason into a set of highly imaginative — not logical but figural — processes”
(Hart 2001: 315). In other words, cognitive linguists acknowledge that language
usages — even such rhetorical devices as metaphor and metonymy — shape, de-
fine, and limit how conceptualizations occur.
Furthermore, cognitive linguists acknowledge that categorization is funda-
mental to the cognitive process of conceptualization. Our concepts — and the pro-
cesses by which we conceptualize — depend on the ability to categorize objects or
ideas. Gregory Murphy, a cognitive psychologist who explores the relationship be-
tween cognition and language, explains it this way: “Our concepts embody much
of our knowledge of the world, telling us what things are and what properties
they have”; for example, we know the difference between “chair” and “not-chair”
when we enter a new room, or when we meet a “bulldog” we know it is a member
 Introduction 3

of the category “dog” but not “cat” (Murphy 2002: 1). Murphy calls concepts “the
glue that holds our mental world together…. in that they tie our past experiences
to our present interactions with the world, and because the concepts themselves
are connected to our larger knowledge structures” (1). We cannot think without
categorizing, nor can we think without concepts.
Cognitive linguists, such as George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1980), have
thus traced how conceptualization is affected by various linguistic phenomena,
but especially metaphors. They argue that we conceptualize the world in ways that
are influenced by our embodiment, and they maintain that the language we use
shapes how we conceive ideas and process them:
[M]etaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and
action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act,
is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.
The concepts that govern our thought are not just matters of the intellect.
They also govern our everyday functioning, down to the most mundane details.
Our concepts structure what we perceive, how we get around in the world, and
how we relate to other people. Our conceptual system thus plays a central role in
defining our everyday realities. (1980: 3)
Lakoff and Johnson therefore argue that such cognitive structures as metaphors
and their influence on conceptualization can and should be studied in terms of
both language and thought.
For example, the concept of growth is defined first by categorization, but also
second, in metaphorical terms. That which is growing exists in the category of “that
which is animate” not in the category “that which is inanimate” or “that which is
dead.” Human growth also involves the embodied nature of the brain; brains are
housed within organic bodies that grow, mature, and die, just as all organic beings
gestate, grow, decline, and die. Indeed, both the English words “maturation” and
“growth” have their origins in agricultural metaphors of plant growth: the verb “to
mature” entered English via the influence of Middle French (and therefore Latin)
on Middle English: maturare in its Latin transitive sense means “to ripen, finish in
good time,” while “to grow,” in its oldest usage in English, emerged from Middle
Dutch’s groeyen or groyen, with the denotation “to manifest vigorous life; to put
forth foliage, flourish” (Mature, v. 2012; Grow, v. 2012). Human conceptualizations
of growth and maturation in England during the Middle Ages were thus clearly in-
fluenced by plant growth and its importance in sustaining human life through ag-
riculture. Thus, it would seem that more than a millennia ago, speakers of English
conceived of growth in metaphorical terms: people grow like plants grow.
Today, metaphors of growth surround us. We employ so many metaphors of
growth in our daily lives that we don’t even notice many of them. We say that a
project grew out of another project when we mean one project developed from
4 Literary Conceptualizations of Growth

another; we say that Americans have a growing sense of anxiety about the econ-
omy when we mean they have an increasing sense of anxiety; we say that we’re
growing bored when we mean we’re getting bored or becoming bored. We tell
school children to “grow their minds” when we want them to think in new and
difficult ways, and we tell irritating people to “grow up” when they are acting im-
mature, even if they are already adults — which we also refer to metaphorically as
being a “grown-up.” These metaphorical conceptualizations of growth may well
be inescapable because we are neurologically wired to think in terms of our own
growth. That is, after all, what our brains do for many years of our lives: grow —
and then, if we live long enough, eventually decline.
Cognitive linguistics has influenced the study of metaphor in literature in a
field sometimes referred to by the name “cognitive poetics” that often focuses on
poetry. Narrative theorists have also been influenced by cognitive linguists (and
its related subdiscipline, cognitive poetics) to pay attention to the ways that nar-
ratives, such as novels, intersect with cognition and language. Psycho-emotional
growth, for example, provides an easily recognizable narrative pattern in the
Bildungsroman, the novel of transition from youth to adulthood. But there is more
to understanding literature than simply understanding metaphors or the patterns
of narrative structure. How, for example, do the cognitive processes of memory
and repetition figure in the creation and reception of narrative? How does the brain
actually come to recognize and understand stock characters, narrative formulae,
and narrative conventions? How does language-use limit and enhance narrative
understanding? And how does narrative affect our cognitive ability to recognize
larger cultural narratives at work in our lives? Cognitive literary theorists, includ-
ing Mark Turner (1991), David Herman (2002), Alan Richardson (2004), Lisa
Zunshine (2006), and Monika Fludernik (2010) explore these very ideas.
Within the field of children’s and adolescent literature, cognitive literary
theory is also gaining increased attention. For example, Margaret Mackey (2010,
2011, 2012) has explored the influence of embodiment and memory on the cog-
nitive perception of children’s literature in a series of essays that has appeared
in Children’s Literature in Education. Karen Coats (2011) also traces the relation-
ship between embodiment and cognition in an elegant exploration of metaphors
of the body as container. John Stephens (2011) investigates the relationship be-
tween cognition and narrative patterns called scripts in his article “Schemas and
Scripts,” work that is further explored in a specific multicultural context by Sung-
Ae Lee (2011). Marek Oziewicz (2007, 2011) has also relied on cognitive literary
theory to explore conceptualizations of justice, particularly in terms of scripts.
Maria Nikolajeva (2012) examines the cognitive creation of empathy in multi-
media texts in “Reading Other People’s Minds through Word and Image,” while
Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer demonstrates this process at work in the YA novel
 Introduction 5

in her article “Emotional Connection” (2012). Kümmerling-Meibauer (2011) also

explores the role of cognition in the emergent literacy of young children. Lydia
Kokkola (2013) examines how competing cognitive conceptualizations of inno-
cence and sexuality influence knowledge production in adolescent literature. Not
only do these critics demonstrate the usefulness of cognitive literary theory (in-
cluding cognitive poetics and cognitive narratology) to children’s and adolescent
literature, but — taken as a whole — they also show how influential the idea of
embodied cognition is to literature written for youth.
Narrative cannot happen without cognition, so it seems inevitable that cogni-
tive narratology would emerge as the intersection between cognitive linguistics
and narrative theory. “Cognitive narratology can be defined as the study of mind-
relevant aspects of storytelling practices, wherever — and by whatever means —
those practices occur” (Herman 2011: 2). Thus, although narrative theory focuses
largely on texts alone, cognitive narratology focuses on the interrelationship be-
tween cognition and textual structures. Although my work focuses more on the
reception of text than on its creation, cognitive narratology offers insight into both
how narrative structures involving growth emerge and are perceived. I should,
however, offer a caveat: while this text is informed by cognitive literary theory, it
is not intended to be a primer in how cognitive literary theory, particularly cogni-
tive narratology, is meant to work. Rather, Literary Conceptualizations of Growth
is an exploration of how literary conceptualizations of growth are enacted in nov-
els about characters living through a phase of life that is typically associated with
growth: adolescence. I rely on cognitive literary theory in this exploration because
these theorizations are fundamental to my explanation of how and why adolescent
literature is so invested in concepts of growth.

Brain science

We know that cognition changes during adolescence; indeed, the brain may well
change more during adolescence than any other stage after our births except for the
first six months of life.1 According to Blakemore and Choudhury, two areas of the

1. Adolescence is a discursive and socially-situated construct; that is, it is a language-driven

concept that changes based on context, including era. Various definitions offered by experts in
contemporary Euro-American contexts emphasize biophysical age and puberty: adolescence
is “post-pubertal youth” (Adams & Berzonsky 2006: xxi); “Adolescence, in modern industrial
societies, is the transition from childhood to adulthood. It lasts from age 11 or 12 until the late
teens or early twenties” (Papalia, Olds & Feldman 2006); “Adolescence is thus a modern — and
even postmodern — concept that acknowledges the unique space between childhood and full
adulthood” (Christenbury, Bomer & Smagorinsky 2009: 4). Perhaps the most practical and least
6 Literary Conceptualizations of Growth

brain develop with particular rapidity following puberty: the parietal lobe, which is
involved with integrating sensory data, and the frontal lobe, which is the center of
executive functioning (2006: 296–297). Increases in both the white matter and the
thickening of the neurons’ protective layer of myelin in the prefrontal cortex make
it possible for adolescents to process information more quickly than they did as
children; the neural pruning that immediately follows the onset of puberty allows
adolescents to process information more efficiently (Steinberg 2005: 70). Thus, the
changes triggered by puberty include — among other brain functions — increased
executive functioning skills, increased social cognition, increased processing ef-
ficiency, increased risk-taking, and decreased negative mood regulation.
The frontal lobe experiences perhaps more changes than other lobes of the
brain during adolescence. The frontal lobe pertains to an understanding of narra-
tive because it is involved in both social cognition and executive function. Executive
function includes “selective attention, decision-making, voluntary response inhibi-
tion and working memory” (Blakemore & Choudhury 2006: 301). Understanding
a narrative depends on selective attention, some degree of decision-making, and
a good measure of memory. Social cognition, which also occurs in the frontal
cortex, includes such issues as self-awareness, perspective-taking, emotion- and
facial recognition, and a “theory of mind, that is the ability to understand other
minds by attributing mental states such as beliefs, desires, and intentions to other
people” (Blakemore & Choudhury 2006: 302). Premack and Woodruff argue that
“[a]n individual has a theory of mind if he imputes mental states to himself and
others” (1978: 515). Frith, Happé, and Simmons build on this definition to argue
that in order to “mentalize,” or understand and represent other people’s thoughts,
“we need to be able to represent mental states, such as belief and desire, if we are
to understand and predict other people’s behaviour. The term ‘theory of mind’
(Premack & Woodruff 1978) is often used to refer to the (quite unconscious) abil-
ity to attribute mental states, and to use these invisible postulates to explain behav-
iour in everyday life” (Frith et al. 1994: 109–110). Following the work of Frith and
her colleagues, Blakemore and Choudhury argue that “The ability to take another’s
perspective is crucial for successful social communication” (2006: 302). That abil-
ity is also crucial for humans to understand narrative — and during adolescence,
frontal lobe activities increase our ability to understand perspective complexly:
“[P]uberty represents a period of synaptic reorganisation and as a consequence
the brain might be more sensitive to experiential input at this period of time in

contextually-situated definition is offered by Lerner and Steinberg, which describes adolescence

as nothing more or less than “the second decade of life” (2004: x). I must note, however, that
all literary characters are discursive and are therefore not necessarily subject to the biophysical
conditions that psychological definitions of adolescence imply.
 Introduction 7

the realm of executive function and social cognition” (Blakemore & Choudhury
2006: 307). Thus, what we know about cognitive development of the adolescent
brain provides us with information both about how adolescents process what they
read and why they can read at a more complex level following puberty than they
can prior to puberty.
Laurence Steinberg argues that it is essential that we understand adolescence
as a stage of life that is vulnerable “specifically because of gaps between emotion,
cognition and behavior” (2005: 69). As he observes, many changes in the brain
are central to “the regulation of behavior and emotion and to the perception and
evaluation of risk and reward,” and there is a disconnect “between the adolescent’s
affective experience and his or her ability to regulate arousal and motivation” (69–
70). He emphasizes the significant changes (and increases) in adolescents’ ability
to reason, process information, and master particular cognitive skills that create a
sense of expertise (70). In effect, the increases in information processing, execu-
tive functioning skills and social cognition have particular bearing on adolescent
literature because literary concepts of growth are often implicated in the increased
complexity of teenaged characters’ thinking and their social relationships.

Growth

Literary Conceptualizations of Growth is an exploration of the processes by which

maturation is represented specifically in adolescent literature. The study is inflect-
ed by cognitive literary theory and by cognitive linguistics and its influence on
experiential philosophy; the history of ideas also proves to be germane to the ex-
amination of how critics, scholars, and philosophers have historically constructed
the concept of growth. This study, then, has two interrelated goals: to examine how
concepts of growth manifest themselves in adolescent literature and to interrogate
how growth serves as a cognitive concept that structures our ability to think about
adolescence as literary critics.
Chapter 1 introduces rudimentary concepts in cognitive linguistics (such as
the idea of the embodied metaphor) as basic tools for exploring in Chapter 2 more
complex embodied narrative concepts involved in patterns of growth (such as
schema, script, and sequence). Chapter 3 investigates the cognitive locus of cul-
tural narratives that affects maturation. Chapter 4 provides a specific case study
of the cognitively embedded nature of cultural narratives. I turn in Chapter 5 to
an exploration of how authors use these concepts in sophisticated explorations of
growth as epistemologically and ontologically experienced. Cognitive linguistics
situates itself as a mediated site between philosophical explorations of ontology and
epistemology; Lakoff and Johnson refer to their philosophy as “experientialism,”
8 Literary Conceptualizations of Growth

arguing that all epistemology and ontology are dependent on embodied experi-
ences (1980: 226). The conceptualization of growth — especially as it is depicted
in adolescent literature — is thus implicated in the embodied metaphors, scripts,
and cultural narratives that demonstrate the experiential nature of both being and
knowing. The book concludes in Chapter 6 with an archaeology of the concept
of growth, as Foucault (1994) uses the term archaeology, tracing the concept of
growth both in terms of the history of ideas and in terms of how critics of litera-
ture for the young themselves rely on emplotments that are informed by cogni-
tive concepts of growth. In sum, Literary Conceptualizations of Growth argues that
maturation, as it is conceptualized within adolescent literature, links cognition
inviolably to embodiment with significant epistemological, ontological, disciplin-
ary, and cultural implications.
In all cases, the youth novels and films I examine are English-language texts
for one very practical reason: metaphors are used uniquely within each language.
Some languages allow for metaphors to be translated with precision; others require
a shift in metaphor that could well alter the original meaning and/or the cognitive
effect of the reading process. Because so much of what I am doing here requires
me to analyze closely the relationship between metaphor and conceptualization, I
think it prudent to base my analyses in the language I know best. I have, however,
tried to select novels that represent a broader range than just those written in the
U.S., so I have also included narratives written by authors from Australia, Canada,
New Zealand, and the U.K. These novels are not discussed in chronological order;
rather, they have been selected to represent various ideas at work in the cognitive
narratology of growth. While I have chosen those novels — and in Chapter 4, films
— that I think best support my effort to interrogate growth as a concept, all of the
texts are necessarily limited by the context in which they were created.
Growth is a powerful and fundamental concept within adolescent literature and
children’s literature. Although I limit my study to adolescent literature because I seek
to interrogate, among other things, how traditions of the Bildungsroman influence
our field, much of the work here can also be extrapolated to children’s literature.
How we think about growth influences how we experience growth — and what
we tell adolescents about their own growth, in turn, has significant ramifications
for their own conceptualizations of maturation. As historian Robert Nisbet once
noted, “No occupation or discipline can make do without its metaphors…. Even
so, metaphors must be watched; they can be treacherous” (1970:351).2

2. Material on pages 28–31 is reprinted by permission of the Publishers from “Images of

Growth: Embodied Metaphors in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” forthcoming in Representing
Children in Chinese and U.S. Children’s Literature, edited by Claudia Nelson and Rebecca Morris
(Farnham: Ashgate, 2014). Copyright © 2014
 Introduction 9

Acknowledgements

My first acknowledgements must go to the scholars whose intellectual interests

have stimulated me to explore conceptualizations of growth: Susan L. Stewart and
Melissa Sara Smith. Their dissertations and our subsequent conversations have
shaped my interests for the better part of a decade now.
I am also grateful to Margaret Mackey, John Stephens, Karen Coats, Michelle
H. Martin, and Bruce Hawkins, who all encouraged me, in different and signifi-
cant ways, to explore cognitive linguistics and literary theory. Each of the members
of ISU’s 2012 seminar on cognitive narratology in children’s literature also influ-
enced this project, so I thank Ayla Goetsch, Melanie Goss, Karly Grice, Jordana
Hall, Amy Hicks, Meghann Meeusen, Miranda Mills, Niall Nance-Carroll, Susana
Rodriguez, Christine Stewart, and Elizabeth Williams. Emily Woster, Beth Pearce,
Mpale Mwansasu-Silkiluwasha (my sister!), and Hari Adhikari also provided me
with interesting and fruitful lines of thought. Laura Berk and Sam Catanzaro guid-
ed me toward various studies in the field of psychology, for which I am grateful.
I would like to thank those members of the Children’s Literature Association
who have created professional opportunities that have allowed me the space in
which to expand this project. Jonathan Klassen of Soochow University in Taiwan,
Claudia Nelson of Texas A & M University, and Rosemary Ross Johnston of
University of Technology, Sydney, have been particularly supportive in this regard.
I also thank Betsy Hearne, Mike Cadden, Claudia Mills, Jan Susina, Mary Moran,
Lynne Vallone, Kenneth Kidd, Yoshida Junko, Jean Webb, Jackie Stallcup, Annette
Wannamaker, Paula Connolly, Kate Capshaw, Mark West, Lissa Paul, Leona Fisher,
Beth Marshall, Teya Rosenberg, Marilynn Olson, Lisa Rowe Fraustino, Annette
Wannamaker, Jackie Stallcup, Jennie Miskec, Gwen Tarbox, Kathy Kiessling, and
Carly Armstrong. Special thanks to Kara Keeling and Scott Pollard for always be-
ing available for a good meal and an even better glass of wine. Joseph W. Campbell
and Billie Jarvis-Freeman deserve special recognition for both their friendship and
for working with me in a life-changing independent study one lovely summer.
The editors of Benjamins Children’s Literature, Culture, and Cognition series
include Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer, Maria Nikolajeva, Nina Christensen, and
Elina Druker. I am especially grateful to Professor Kümmerling-Meibauer for in-
spiring me to draft the manuscript and submit it to this series.
Various dear friends have also been willing to offer both intellectual advice
and emotional support, so I thank Pam Riney-Kehrberg and Susan Burt for their
almost daily support in the development of this project over the last three years.
The friends who have kept me going with coffee and walks and music and beer
include April Schultz, Kass Fleisher, Karen Khusro, Rick Martin, Tak Cheung, Jim
Stanlaw, Scott Jordan, Sally Parry, Bob McLaughlin, Sue Sprecher, Barb Heyl, Judi
10 Literary Conceptualizations of Growth

Sevel, and Pat and Dick Witzig. Becky and Jim Skibo have sustained my faith in
more than one institution, and because of Jim, I will always think of this as the
book that grew by “magic.” Illinois State University staff members Diane Smith
and Peggy Haycraft have provided both efficient and loving support. Without ISU
librarians Julie Derden, Jean MacDonald, and Maureen Brunsdale, nothing would
be possible. And two ISU deans also deserve special mention: Greg Simpson, Dean
of Arts and Sciences, and Dane Ward, Dean of Libraries.
Most of all, I am indebted to my wonderful and intellectually invigorating
family: my husband, George F. Seelinger, and our delightfully engaging children,
George H., John, and Katharine. These three Seelinger children were all teenag-
ers when I both began and finished the first draft of this project, so it is to be
noted that their adolescences very likely had a great deal to do with stimulating my
scholarly interest in adolescent growth.
 Chapter 1

Growth, cognitive linguistics,

and embodied metaphors

As a literary term, adolescent literature refers to both creative works, such as fic-
tion or drama or poetry, and the critical study or literary criticism of those cre-
ative works. Additionally, in both senses of the term, adolescent literature is closely
linked to children’s literature, particularly around issues of growth. Because
growth is arguably one of the most salient features of fiction for young people, the
idea of growth gains much consideration in the criticism that attempts to define
literature written for youth.
In this chapter, I will first provide some background information for my argu-
ment, including a review of the literary theory dealing with growth and basic defi-
nitions of the Bildungsroman and terms related to that pivotal concept. My goal in
this section is to establish the pervasiveness of the concept of growth within ado-
lescent literature. Next, I give the reader a brief overview of important concepts
in cognitive linguistics that help explain the prevalence of growth as a concept
in fiction about adolescence. This section is a general introduction to basic ideas
from the field of cognitive linguistics and is not necessarily specific only to adoles-
cent literature, although L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables (1908) supplies
examples that are particularly germane. In the third section, I examine the meta-
phors literary critics themselves use to describe growth in adolescent literature to
demonstrate that literary critics are as influenced by embodied conceptualizations
of growth as literary artists are. Finally, as an example of how to employ a cognitive
reading of adolescent literature, I conclude this chapter by analyzing the embod-
ied metaphors at work in a canonical American novel about adolescence, Mark
Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). Ultimately, I hope to demonstrate
that cognitive conceptualizations of growth are a major factor in the genre of ado-
lescent literature (literature about adolescence) and its subgenre, the Young Adult
(YA) novel, which is written for and marketed directly to adolescents.

Background and review of the literature

Critics of both adolescent literature and children’s literature frequently observe

how a protagonist’s growth shapes the plot of novels about young people. It should
12 Literary Conceptualizations of Growth

be noted that most of the critics I include in the following literature review adhere
to a standard convention of the field in considering adolescent protagonists to be
residing within the broader scope of a general category of literary study called
“children’s literature” — a convention to which I have also adhered, as in my book,
Waking Sleeping Beauty (Trites 1997). Thus, many observations about “children’s
literature” in what follows can also be considered to apply to adolescent literature.
For example, like me, Vandergrift (1980), Lukens (1982), Wolf (1985), Stephens
(1992), Russell (2001), Nikolajeva (2002), and Natov (2003) also do not distin-
guish children’s literature from adolescent literature when they are evaluating the
tendency of protagonists to grow in fiction for the young. That said, this chron-
ological review of the literature reveals how prevalent the concept of growth is
within the study of adolescent (and children’s) literature.
Rebecca Lukens believes growth figures prominently in novels for the young
because it is fundamental to the human condition: “In life the development of a
person’s character or personality is a matter of growth and change” — so, “char-
acter development means showing the character … with the complexity of the
human being”; ergo, well-developed characters must grow (1982: 30, italics in the
original). Lukens is participating in a bias that assumes literary characters written
for a young audience “must” grow as inevitably as preadolescent and adolescent
readers themselves do. In a similar vein, Kay Vandergrift argues: “Main characters
… are three-dimensional complex individuals who grow, change, and develop as
a result of the events of story” (1980: 110, italics added). Also writing in the 1980s,
Virginia Wolf concludes that “[a]ll great children’s literature [is] about growing up”
(1985: 299, italics added).
John Stephens considers “the most pervasive theme in children’s fiction” to
be “the transition within the individual from infantile solipsism to maturing so-
cial awareness” (1992: 3), while Robyn McCallum also assumes that growth is a
defining factor of adolescence. She argues that adolescent fiction invariably inter-
rogates subject-formation because “ideas about and representations of subjectivity
are always inherent in the central concerns of this fiction: that is in the concerns
with personal growth and maturation, and with relationships between the self and
others, and between individuals and the world, society or the past” (1999: 256, ital-
ics added). According to McCallum, literary adolescence is inflected by the con-
ventional wisdom that adolescence marks a time of growth that includes changing
self-perception: “Concepts of personal identity and selfhood are formed in dia-
logue with society, with language, and with other people, and while this dialogue
is ongoing, modern adolescence — that transition stage between childhood and
adulthood — is usually thought of as a period during which notions of selfhood
undergo rapid and radical transformation” (1999: 3). Thus, both Stephens and
McCallum write about adolescence as a time of transition that involves growth.
 Chapter 1. Growth, cognitive linguistics, and embodied metaphors 13

David Russell asserts that “In most children’s stories, the protagonist is a dy-
namic character, that is, one who changes throughout the narrative, usually toward
greater maturity” (2001: 58, italics in the original). Similarly, Nikolajeva calls “in-
ner growth” the “foremost goal” of children’s novels that are character-oriented
rather than plot-oriented; the culmination of the master plot in children’s liter-
ature, she argues, occurs when the typical protagonist has “found a treasure or
gained knowledge and maturity” (2002: 160). She also acknowledges that “[i]n
character-oriented narratives, we expect the character to obtain new — presum-
ably higher — moral qualities, mature spiritually, gain knowledge and insights,
and so on” (2002: 64, italics added). Similarly, Roni Natov identifies “the central
question of much of children’s literature” as a response to the following question:
“How can we grow up without losing the spontaneity of our natural responses?”
(2003: 101, italics added).
Alison Waller identifies growth as an end-goal in both realism and fantasy in
YA literature: “the conventions of teen realism foreground social problems and a
concern with the teenage protagonist’s solutions through interpersonal growth.
A fantastic realist text might cover similar ground but pay more attention to the
relationship between what is real and unreal, shifting interpretive activity from so-
cial reality to metaphysical questions” (2009: 12, italics added). Thus, growth does
seem to be a central issue for both children’s and adolescent literature. However,
although many of the conceptualizations of growth I am exploring in this text per-
tain to both children’s and adolescent literature, I am limiting my focus to adoles-
cent literature for both purposes of economy and out of a recognition that growth
in children’s literature is depicted in more diverse and less formulaic ways than in
the bildungsroman-influenced genre of the YA novel.
The Bildungsroman provides the narrative pattern that has had the greatest in-
fluence on adolescent literature — although the term is frequently misused (Trites
2000: 10–15). Manfred Engel identifies the Bildungsroman as being derived from
the Entwicklungsroman, the novel of development, as are the Erziehungsroman
(the novel of education) and the Künstlerroman (the novel of artistic develop-
ment) (2008: 265). All of these genres have in common the concept of “Bildung”
as “a process of organic or quasi-organic development” (Engel 2008: 264); the
Bildungsroman is thus necessarily a novel “of character” and “of development” and
“not a process of social or biological determination but a process of formation”
(265–266). That is, the Bildungsroman is focused on the interior or spiritual growth
of one character. According to Jerome Buckley, “By the time [the protagonist of the
Bildungsroman] has decided, after painful soul-searching, the sort of accommoda-
tion to the modern world he can honestly make, he has left his adolescence behind
and entered upon his maturity” (1974: 18). Typically, the Bildungsroman involves
maturation into adulthood or an embarkation into adulthood.
14 Literary Conceptualizations of Growth

Critics such as Maria Nikolajeva aptly separate bildungsroman-influenced

novels that focus on character growth from series books in which the protago-
nist’s maturation would be detrimental to the publication (and subsequent sales)
of sequels: “There are in fact protagonists who do not evolve or mature, do not
gain any material wealth or moral improvement. The protagonists of formulaic
fiction normally do not change, physically or spiritually…. The absence of change
is dictated by the nature of the genre” (2002: 65). Series books, such as the Nancy
Drew books or Sweet Valley High novels, are focused more on plot than on char-
acter. Because these books do not depict character growth, they are not the subject
of this study. Rather, I focus herein on those novels that appear to be participating
in the traditions of the Bildungsroman by privileging insights into a character’s
interior growth, whether it is psychological, emotional, creative, or ethical.
This constant presence of growth as an idea in adolescent literature leads me
to ask two questions: how is growth privileged in the theories of adolescent litera-
ture? and, more important, why? — by which I mean, why do so many authors
produce texts that privilege growth, and why have literary theorists been so inter-
ested in this pattern for more than a century? In other words, why should that be?
Why is attention to growth so prevalent in adolescent literature?
For most of my academic life, I have assumed that European traditions of the
Bildungsroman have influenced adolescent literature to focus on the interior life
and psychological growth of the individual. Certainly, I still consider that to be
one factor responsible for the proliferation of this pattern. But cognitive literary
theory has led me to believe that we write novels about growth because our em-
bodied brains know growth. We understand intuitively what growth is because we
have witnessed the growth of plants, animals, and other people — and far more
significantly, we have experienced our own physical, emotional, and cognitive
growth. Literary Conceptualizations of Growth: Metaphors and cognition in ado-
lescent literature thus relies on cognitive literary theory — and particularly on the
study of cognitive linguistics and cognitive narratology — to explore cognitive
conceptualizations of the idea of growth within the field of adolescent literature.

Cognitive linguistics and embodied metaphors

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson define cognitive science as the “discipline that
studies conceptual systems” (1999: 10); Gilles Fauconnier identifies “[m]eaning
construction [a]s a cornerstone of cognitive science” (2003: 2). Some cognitive sci-
entists study, for example, “the active (and largely unconscious) mental processing
that makes behavior understandable” (Richardson 2004: 1). As a subdiscipline of
cognitive science, cognitive linguistics is invested in examining how human beings
 Chapter 1. Growth, cognitive linguistics, and embodied metaphors 15

think and communicate by creating language categories that affect conceptualiza-

tion — and cognitive linguists also explore how the language of those conceptu-
alizations, in turn, alters cognition. Moreover, cognitive linguists recognize the
brain as embodied; that is, all brains are housed in a body and therefore dependent
upon that embodiment, because all thought resides within a body. Cognitive lin-
guists therefore acknowledge the cultural situatedness of cognition because hu-
man thought, both conscious and unconscious, is influenced and constructed by
the cultures in which individuals live and the language that they employ (Hart
2001: 315).
Cognitive linguists are thus aware of two related issues: language use is em-
bodied, and culturally-inflected language use affects how we think about things
or conceptualize. Cognitive linguistics, then, focuses on the relationship between
cognitive conceptualization and language. In the rest of this chapter, I will explore
the various ways that the concept of growth is affected by the language that literary
critics and authors use, with a particular emphasis on how embodiment interacts
with the conceptualization of growth.
According to Lakoff and Johnson, one of the most fundamental and prima-
ry acts of cognition required for any animal species to survive is the ability to
categorize. They argue that the ability to categorize is essential for evolutionary
survival: humans, like most animal species, depend on their ability to identify at
a minimum two important categories: food and not-food (1999: 17). The ability
to distinguish prey from not-prey and safety from danger are also essential for
survival. Lakoff and Johnson describe how dependent cognitive categorization is
on our embodiment: “Categorization is therefore a consequence of how we are
embodied. We have evolved to categorize; if we hadn’t, we would not have sur-
vived” (1999: 18). Because most humans perceive the world through four or five
senses, we tend to create categories based on those perceptions. “Categorization is
thus not a purely intellectual matter, occurring after the fact of experience. Rather
the formation and use of categories is the stuff of experience. It is part of what
our bodies and brains are constantly engaged in” (Lakoff & Johnson 1999: 19). We
categorize; therefore, we think — and we think; therefore, we categorize. The fol-
lowing two fundamental principles are central to cognitive linguistics: all thought
(both conscious and unconscious) is embodied, and all thought depends on cat-
egorizations that are influenced by that embodiment.
This embodied ability to categorize affects how we form concepts and how
concepts, once formed, in turn shape our subsequent ability to perceive the world.
Lakoff and Johnson argue that concepts “are crucially shaped by our bodies and
brains” (1999: 22), and they use as one example the idea of spatial-relations con-
cepts. We understand such concepts as “here” and “there,” for example, in relation-
ship to where our bodies are positioned at any given moment. We understand such
16 Literary Conceptualizations of Growth

concepts as “in front of ” the classroom or “at the back of the cupboard” because
our own bodies have fronts and backs (Lakoff & Johnson 1999: 30). In a more
complex example, we also understand the idea of containers through our bodies
— because we know what it means to be full when we eat or to empty our bladders.
Indeed, Lakoff and Johnson argue that the English word “in” relies on a “container
schema” of “a bounded region in space” that includes three structures: “an inside,
a boundary, and an outside” (1999: 31–32).1 Our ability to conceptualize the rela-
tionship between “in” and “out” depends on our bodies both having those bound-
aries and being able to experience them perceptually by seeing and/or feeling how
containers — from cups to football stadiums — have interiors, boundaries, and
exteriors. Thus, embodiment is inherent in a concept as basic as in.
The inherently embodied ability to conceptualize, Lakoff and Johnson argue,
leads to a proliferation of concepts that are, effectively, metaphors. That is, we rely
on linguistic concepts to help represent the knowledge we have gained cognitively
from living as embodied beings. In Metaphors We Live By, Lakoff and Johnson
demonstrate how metaphors structure the way people think: “Our concepts struc-
ture what we perceive, how we get around in the world, and how we relate to other
people. Our conceptual system thus plays a central role in defining our everyday
realities” (1980: 3). Our brains store language in a cognitive process that proves
to shape — and even structure — our perceptions because “metaphor resides in
thought, not just in words” (Lakoff & Turner 1989: 2).
Cognitive linguists contend that this process of structuring our understanding
of abstract concepts in terms of embodiment begins in childhood. Our physical
experiences of living in the world shape our language. For example, many speakers
of English learn in childhood to equate metaphors of physical vision with meta-
phors of cognitive understanding, particularly if they are sighted.2 This is demon-
strated when people say such things as, “Yes, I see that” or “The argument looks
different from my point of view” (M. Johnson 1990: 108). In Chinese a similar met-
aphor occurs when the character “ming” (bright) is combined with the character
“bai” (white) to indicate the idea of understanding something clearly or with clar-
ity: 明白 míngbái. Speakers of English are thus by no means the only people who
conceptualize thought in terms of vision. These are embodied metaphors; that is,

1. For more on the body-as-container within children’s literature, see Coats (2011).
2. For a Disability Studies critique of Lakoff and Johnson, see Amy Vidali, who argues that “they
are ableist in assuming that bodies have particular physical/cognitive/sensory experiences and
related metaphorical expressions” (Vidali 2010: 34). This position, of course, privileges the effect
of language usage on individuals, as opposed to examining how language, including metaphor
usage, develops in communal and cultural contexts. As Vidali notes: “A disability approach to
metaphor critiques the obvious and subtle implications for disability” (46).
 Chapter 1. Growth, cognitive linguistics, and embodied metaphors 17

“seeing clearly” is a metaphor for understanding that arises from the embodied
ability to — literally — see. According to Lakoff and Johnson (1980), the embod-
ied metaphors we use affect our cognition because when we apply one embodied
concept to another unrelated, abstract concept, both concepts become linked in
our cognition — as vision and understanding are for most speakers of English.
In this example, “vision” is the source domain because it is the conceptual domain
from which we are drawing the metaphorical expression; “understanding” is the
target domain because that is the concept that we are trying to explain by making
the comparison (Lakoff & Johnson 1980: 48).
This process of mentally applying one conceptual category from a source do-
main to a target domain is called mapping. Mapping inevitably entails applying one
concept to another; that is, we map one concept onto another, as we do when we
map the perception of sight onto the cognitive concept of understanding. According
to Fauconnier, “mappings between domains are at the heart of the unique human
cognitive faculty of producing, transferring, and processing meaning” (2003: 1);
moreover, most mappings occur on an unconscious level (2003: 1–2). “A mapping,
in the most general mathematical sense, is a correspondence between two sets
that assigns to each element in the first a counterpart in the second” (Fauconnier
2003: 1). To clarify, when we think of one idea in terms of another, we change the
nature of how we are thinking about that primary idea. Cognitive linguists some-
times refer to these ideas or concepts as domains; a domain thus refers to “any sort
of conceptualization: a perceptual experience, a concept, a conceptual complex,
an elaborate knowledge system, etc.” (Langacker 2006: 31). When we map one do-
main onto another, we change how we have conceptualized that idea. And we are
rarely aware when we map one concept (or domain) onto another.
Additionally, when we map one domain onto another, we may change how
we understand it. For example, our sense that UNDERSTANDING IS VISION alters
our ability to think about understanding in different terms.3 In English we don’t,
for example, have metaphors about smelling a strong scent that equates with un-
derstanding. Thus, we don’t say, “I smell what you mean,” but we do say, “I see
what you mean.” An example of a playful parody of this mapping occurred when
American hippies in the 1960s said, “I feel you,” as a way of saying, “I see what you
mean” — but the entailment UNDERSTANDING IS TOUCHING has not maintained
the cultural dominance that UNDERSTANDING IS VISION has. Cognitive linguists
call mapping one concept onto another in a limiting way an entailment; that is,

3. Herein, I will rely on the conventions established by Lakoff and Johnson in Metaphors We
Live By (1980). In cognitive linguistics, metaphorical statements are set in all caps, and I will
italicize metaphorical words that refer to embodiment in quotations. All italicizations are mine,
unless otherwise noted.
18 Literary Conceptualizations of Growth

when we think about one domain or concept in terms of another, we define, limit,
and structure how we can subsequently think about it (Lakoff & Johnson 1980: 92–
93). Frequently, our embodiment influences entailments; our conceptualizations
are defined by and even limited by our embodied perceptions of the world.
Literature provides many examples of sighted characters mapping the embod-
ied act of seeing onto the conceptual act of understanding. A highly visual char-
acter, such as Anne Shirley, in Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, is
one obvious example. Anne frequently claims to “see” something when she means
that she understands it. When she pauses to think about something, she says “let
me see” (Montgomery 2004: 19, 20, 36, 203, italics added), and when she can’t
understand something, she says, “I don’t see why” (83, 225, 242, italics added).
Anne, and her bosom friend, Diana, and Anne’s guardian Marilla all three use the
embodied metaphor “I don’t see how” when they mean “I don’t know how” (227,
203, 220, italics added). Marilla first explains that she understands Matthew is de-
termined to adopt the orphaned Anne by saying, “Matthew was terrible set on it. I
could see that, so I gave in” (9, italics added). Anne explains earnestly to Matthew
what an affliction her red hair is, “Now you see why I can’t be perfectly happy” (18,
italics added). In this use of the word “see,” Matthew can both literally view the
redness of Anne’s hair and metaphorically understand why it makes her unhappy.
Significantly, when Marilla begins to grow physically blind, Anne makes a
decision to sacrifice her own dreams — the ambitions she has been “look[ing]
forward to” achieving in order to become Marilla’s caretaker (275, italics added).
Anne tells her guardian, “When I left Queen’s my future seemed to stretch out
before me like a straight road. I thought I could see along it for many a milestone.
Now there is a bend in it” (293, italics added). In this construction, she overtly
connects thinking and seeing: “I thought I could see.” Preparing her for this type of
sacrifice has been her dedicated teacher, Miss Stacy, who has agreed to “stay and
see you through,” making her own sacrifices to help those she loves — and Miss
Stacy is the teacher who has taught Anne to become a better writer through an
economy of words, which Anne has gotten so used to now that she can perceive
her writing differently: “I see it’s so much better” (238, 246 italics added). Anne
understands well that her duty lies at Green Gables and that she can still continue
her ambition to be a writer, in part because her writing has improved. But she
uses an embodied metaphor of vision to define her growth, some variation on the
phrase, “I see.” Anne has mapped sight so thoroughly onto understanding that she
can no longer separate the two concepts in her own speech — or how she articu-
lates her own cognitive processes.
Lakoff and Johnson (1999) demonstrate that the metaphors we use shape
how we process and conceptualize information, and they show how our thought
processes are shaped by language use from a very early age. Children’s earliest
 Chapter 1. Growth, cognitive linguistics, and embodied metaphors 19

experience of metaphor comes from a process called conflation, in which they learn
to associate a physical feeling — such as being held — with a metaphor, as we tell
a child when we say in English, “I am holding you in my heart” (Lakoff & Johnson
1999: 46). We know what it is to be physically held; we have learned that the con-
cept “heart” serves metaphorically as the site in our bodies in which we store emo-
tions. Thus, we understand the embodied metaphor of being held in someone’s
heart. These types of experiences throughout our childhoods lead to conflations
that, in turn, cause us to participate in a widespread use of metaphors. Moreover,
cognitive linguists have demonstrated that “The ‘associations’ made during the
period of conflation are realized neurally in simultaneous activations that result in
permanent neural connections being made across the neural networks that define
conceptual domains” (Lakoff & Johnson 1999: 46). That is, throughout our child-
hoods, as we learn to think about concepts in certain terms, our brains neurally
structure these concepts in subsequent years, so that our cognition continues to be
bound by the associations we learned in our childhoods. One example would be
the concept that “UP IS GOOD”; in English, we employ such phrases as “things are
looking up” or “I feel upbeat,” using physical directionality to talk about emotional
cheer (Lakoff & Johnson 1980: 50). As we grow, our cognition continues to build
around these types of embodied associations, which in turn serves to structure
our conceptualizations. As Lakoff and Johnson put it, “We acquire a large system
of primary metaphors automatically and unconsciously simply by functioning in
the most ordinary of ways in the everyday world from our earliest years. We have
no choice in this” (1999: 47).
Take, for example, the spatial relationship involved in the embodied metaphor
of growing up. We refer to children as “growing up” because they literally do grow
upwards in space. When my elder son grew thirteen centimeters (five inches) in
one year, I was not being particularly metaphorical in saying, “My son is growing
up.” He literally was growing upwards. But in the 1970s, when my mother disci-
plined my teenaged self by telling me, “Oh, grow up,” she was using an embodied
metaphor. I had already achieved my full height of 171 centimeters (5’7”), so I had
no way to grow “upwards” anymore. Instead, my mother had mapped the spatial
relationship of upwards growth onto the concept of maturation to create an em-
bodied metaphor: growing up. We use the same embodied metaphor when we dis-
tinguish children from “grown-ups.” We usually don’t mean something like, “this
group of adults is physically taller than those short children”; we mean “this group
of older people is more mature than that group of younger people.” Nonetheless,
we have still employed an embodied metaphor that is spatial.
The entailments on that phrase “grown up” are legion. For example, we imply
that growth is desirable when we tell an adolescent, as my mother did, to “just
grow up.” In addition, the idea of growth being good is linked to another set of
20 Literary Conceptualizations of Growth

spatial metaphors, “UP IS GOOD,” which creates a complex set of associations. It is

good to be able to grow tall enough to reach the light switch or sit in the front seat
of a car or qualify to ride the roller coaster at the amusement park. And it is also
good to be grown up enough that other people depend on one’s maturity, reliabil-
ity, and logic — which is what we mean when we compliment a colleague by saying
behind her back, “She is so sane. She is such a grown-up!” The spatial metaphor
“UP IS GOOD” entails the embodied metaphor of “GROWING UP” in such a way that
not growing up has negative connotations. We accuse immature people of refusing
to grow up; Peter Pan is their poster child precisely because he refuses to “grow
up.” Accusing an adult of not having grown up is a complicated metaphor — and
a stinging insult.
Growth is a complicated concept, but as I hope to demonstrate, our understand-
ing of this concept is sometimes entailed by the way we map embodiment onto the
concept of growth. Moreover, the complex nature of the growth metaphor affects
the field of adolescent literature because, unlike children’s literature, adolescent
literature is a genre in which it is almost always assumed that maturation is both
necessary and positive.4 Children’s literature allows for texts that celebrate child-
hood without insisting on the protagonist’s growth, and, too, being a child in chil-
dren’s literature is often described with positive metaphors. For example, Jonathan
Cott asserts that “Children’s literature … helps us to wake up” (1981: xxii), while
Jerry Griswold analyzes children’s literature in terms of “lightness” (2006: 75–100)
and “aliveness” (2006: 103–122). Hollindale describes children’s literature in terms
of “childness,” which he defines as “the quality of being a child — dynamic, imagi-
native, experimental, interactive and unstable. It is by our childness that we grow”
(1997: 46). Hollindale — like Cott and Griswold — demonstrates that existing in
a life stage called “childhood” is often celebrated in children’s books. But with the
notable exception of certain series books, adolescent literature — whether written
about adolescents and marketed to adults or focused on teenagers in a YA novel
— is a genre saturated with conceptualizations of growth that imply growth is in-
evitable, necessary, sometimes painful, and must lead to adulthood.

Embodied metaphors of growth in literary criticism

As I have noted, the embodied metaphor of growing up permeates adolescent

literature, as do a number of other embodied metaphors. Children and adoles-
cents grow in many ways, including physically and psychologically — that is,

4. Melissa Sara Smith (2010) notes an exception when she analyzes the nostalgia (and grief)
about growing up inherent within adolescent literature.
 Chapter 1. Growth, cognitive linguistics, and embodied metaphors 21

both emotionally, and cognitively. Even those forms of growth that are not visible,
however, such as emotional and cognitive growth, are still embodied experiences
because they occur within that part of the human body referred to as the brain.
Perhaps this is why many authors represent these types of maturation with em-
bodied metaphors that compare mental growth processes to physical experiences
— that is, many authors map embodiment onto maturation by employing em-
bodied metaphors to describe psychological growth in children’s and adolescent
literature. This tendency to structure growth, and especially psychological growth,
in embodied terms serves at least two purposes: authors can use discourse — that
is, language itself — to help readers perceive psychological growth by supplying
physical images that readers readily understand. Even more important, these em-
bodied metaphors reveal the interconnection between mind and body. Since all
brains are embodied, so is all growth — whether that growth is physical or psy-
chological. And because we have so thoroughly internalized embodied metaphors
as part of our cognitive structure, most authors for young people cannot help but
employ images of embodiment to describe maturation metaphorically. Herein, I
analyze those metaphors used to describe maturation that emerge from our bod-
ies. That is, I will examine a wide variety of embodied metaphors of growth, first
as they are deployed by various literary critics and then in the next section as they
are deployed in one fictional example, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn (1885). As with my earlier example from Anne of Green Gables, I employ
Huckleberry Finn both because it is widely known and because embodied meta-
phors recur throughout the text. But first, I explore the embodied metaphors on
which literary critics rely as a way to demonstrate how frequently concepts of psy-
chological growth are entailed by embodiment.
One fairly common metaphor of adolescent growth in literary criticism is
the idea that growth itself is a journey. Mark Turner analyzes the relationship be-
tween “progress” and “journey” with the specific metaphor “MENTAL PROGRESS IS
A JOURNEY” (1991: 204). Lakoff and Johnson analyze the metaphor, “LONG-TERM
ACTIVITIES ARE JOURNEYS” (1999: 193), arguing that this metaphor proliferates
because we have no way of thinking about the passage of time in any other way
than by employing metaphors (1999: 166). The journey is an embodied, physical
process — the body itself moves from point A to point B — but maturation does
not, literally, require that anyone take a trip anywhere. As Lakoff and Turner point
out, the common metaphor that LIFE IS A JOURNEY sets up the following meta-
phorical expectations:
– The person leading a life is a traveler.
– His purposes are destinations.
– The means for achieving purposes are routes.
22 Literary Conceptualizations of Growth

– Difficulties in life are impediments to travel.

– Counselors are guides.
– Progress is the distance traveled.
– Things you gauge your progress by are landmarks.
– Choices in life are crossroads.
– Material resources and talents are provisions. (Lakoff & Turner 1989: 3–4)
Lakoff and Turner invite us to recognize that the metaphor LIFE IS A JOURNEY allows
for the fact that there are many types of journeys and many types of destinations, so
the metaphor can be used flexibly, depending on the context; moreover, the com-
plexity of the journey is enhanced by “the structure of our knowledge of journeys
and our ability to map from that structured knowledge to a conception of life” (61).
Critics of the genre of the Bildungsroman (sometimes referred to as the com-
ing-of-age novel) thus impose these metaphors of embodied journeys onto the
idea of maturation frequently, although they also rely on other embodied meta-
phors as well. For instance, in the 1820s, Karl Morgenstern, the first known critic
to use the term Bildungsroman, implied the genre involves a passage or journey
through time because it portrays “the Bildung of the hero in its beginnings and
growth to a certain stage of completeness” (Labovitz 1987: 2). In explaining the
frequency with which journeys occur within the Bildungsroman, Susanne Howe
observes that the pattern, which includes the motif of “man and his meeting with
the world,” makes a compelling plotline because “it implied the gaining of expe-
rience — usually the author’s own — at the hands of the world, and therefore it
involved action, travel” (1966: 1).5 Critics often describe this metaphorical journey
in terms of stages that must be visited or traveled through. As Tennyson observes,
in the mid-1860’s, Wilhelm Dilthey defined the Bildungsroman as a novel that “ex-
amines a regular course of development in the life of the individual; each of its
stages has its own value and each is at the same time the basis of a higher stage”
(Tennyson 1968: 136, italics added). Dilthey adds to the metaphor of a journey the
notion of ascent; positive growth is both outwards and upwards (because, UP IS
GOOD). Melitta Gerhard also wrote in 1926 about the Bildungsroman as if it were
a physical journey: the novel centers around a character’s “gradual maturing and
growth in the world, in whatever way the goal of his journey may be construed”
(Tennyson 1968: 138, italics added).6 Following in 1958, Hans Heinrich Borcherdt

5. Although not specifically writing about the Bildungsroman, Jerry Griswold demonstrates
how reliant on Joseph Campbell’s monomyth the archetypal connection between “journey-
quest” and “growth” is (1992: 4). See also Stephens and MacCallum (1998: 101–108).
6. I rely on G.B. Tennyson for his translations of Dilthey, Borcherdt, and Gerhard because his
German is far more proficient than mine.
 Chapter 1. Growth, cognitive linguistics, and embodied metaphors 23

described the Bildungsroman as “a reasonably direct line from error to truth, from
confusion to clarity, from uncertainty to certainty, from, as the Germans have it,
nature to spirit” (Tennyson 1968: 137, italics added). Morgenstern’s early definition
of the Bildungsroman, as subsequently developed by Dilthey, Gerhard, Borcherdt,
and Tennyson, captures the sense of development as a staged journey, while also
demonstrating the tendency for us to think of human lives as something that can
be metaphorically sculpted or organically grown:
Briefly stated, Dilthey’s main points about the Bildungsroman are five: (1) the idea
of Bildung, or formation, cultivation, education, shaping of a single main char-
acter, normally a young man; (2) individualism, especially the emphasis on the
uniqueness of the protagonist and the primacy of his private life and thoughts….;
(3) the biographical element….; (4) the connection with psychology, especially
the then-new psychology of development; and (5) the ideal of humanity of the full
realization of all human potential as the goal of life. (Tennyson 1968: 136)

In Dilthey’s terms, spiritual Bildung is “formation” and “cultivation”; it is the

“shaping of a single main character.” Tennyson himself also adds some interesting
embodied metaphors to the mix when he writes that the Bildungsroman is “the
novel of harmonious cultivation of the whole personality,” but he considers the
most interesting novels in this genre to be those which portray how “the protago-
nist comes to a deeper understanding of life” (1968: 142, 140, italics added). Like
Dilthey, Tennyson depicts growth with the metaphor of plant cultivation, but he
also demonstrates the tendency that other critics display of depicting the human
body or human mind as a container that needs to be filled, implying that the goal
is for the character to have a “deeper” understanding and more knowledge, as if
knowledge is a fluid poured into the empty vessel of the adolescent’s empty but
awaiting brain. Martin Swales actually writes about the genre as if it is alive: “the
Bildungsroman is a novel genre which derives its very life from the awareness both
of the given experiential framework of practical reality on the one hand and of the
creative potential of human imagination and reflectivity on the other” (1978: 5);
various German novels “constitute the transmission of a particular kind of fic-
tional concern which is, as it were, the breeding ground for the high points of the
German contribution to the novel form” (6); “the Bildungsroman figures as a vital
fictional medium” (7, italics added in all cases).
In sum, many scholars of the Bildungsroman are unable to write about growth
without relying on metaphors that involve either human embodiment as a con-
tainer or humans who are embodied as artist or farmer or traveler.
Critics of adolescent (and children’s) literature also rely on the journey meta-
phor in their own writing. G. Robert Stange writes that the genre involves “a young
man of talents who progresses from the country to the city, ascends in the social
24 Literary Conceptualizations of Growth

hierarchy, and moves from innocence to experience” (1954: 10, italics added). John
Rowe Townsend observes the ubiquity of the journey (as well as the microcosm) in
literature for the young: “It may be noted that the themes of all these three books —
the dangerous journey, as in The Pilgrim’s Progress; the desert island, as in Robinson
Crusoe; and the miniature or other imaginary world, as in Gulliver — have served for
innumerable later books, both children’s and adult, and are by no means worn out”
(1983: 28). James Johnson describes the adolescent hero as someone who undergoes
a “metamorphosis,” experiencing a “transitional period” with a mind “half-child,
half-adult”; the genre emphasizes “flight and attempted escape as a consequence of
realizing one’s bodily and spiritual isolation” in an “unending search for the meaning
of existence” (1959: 4, 7 italics added). Mordecai Marcus considers the journey to
be inevitable because the protagonist experiencing initiation must undergo a trans-
formation with a specific directional orientation: “this change must point or lead
him towards an adult world” (1960: 222, italics added). According to David Peck,
the initiation “takes us from the protected and ideal world of childhood into the
real and often discouraging … world of adulthood…. In every case there is a loss of
innocence and a consequent gain of experience” (1989: xix, italics added). In an ar-
ticle entitled “The Journey Inward,” Anne Scott MacLeod, traces the increasing ten-
dency of YA authors in the 1960s and 1970s to focus on inward growth rather than
external quests in novels that depict “getting through the teen years to the equally
undefined territory beyond” (1997: 126, italics added). Moreover, Kent Baxter traces
how often since the turn of the twentieth-century adolescence has been depicted as
a “path by which the child becomes an adult” (2008: 11, italics added). The journey
metaphor is pervasive in the literary criticism of adolescent literature.
Buckley, who has written what is probably the most-cited definition of the
Bildungsroman pattern in English, describes the Bildungsroman in terms of the
journey (1974: 17–18), but he also writes about growth in terms of embodied pro-
cesses such as sculpting and art: “Insofar as the word Bildung itself is related to Bild
and Bildnis, it may connote ‘picture’ or ‘portrait’ as well as ‘shaping’ or ‘formation’ ”
(13–14). Sculpting and painting are both embodied processes that require brains,
arms, and hands to work together to create the finished product. He also demon-
strates the tendency to add metaphors of constraint to those that depict growth.
For example, “As he reaches maturity the hero of the Bildungsroman … will typi-
cally feel his bondage, the multiple constraints of living” (281, italics added).7
Metaphors of constraint are frequent, too, in feminist accounts of female de-
velopment. Indeed, Barbara White considers constraint and conflict to be the sine
qua non of the fiction of female development:

7. Lakoff and Turner identify the following metaphors as common in literature: LIFE IS BONDAGE
and LIFE IS A BURDEN (1989: 23, 25).
 Chapter 1. Growth, cognitive linguistics, and embodied metaphors 25

There is a constant sense of deja vu [sic] when girls envy their brothers, when
they express outrage at being molested by a man, when they try to avoid doing
housework, or when they say they feel enclosed, imprisoned, stuffed in a sack, or
under a bell jar. In novel after novel the protagonist is in conflict over her gender
identity…. In her rebellion against growing up female the adolescent heroine is
usually besieged from within and without. She is hampered both by the strength of
social institutions designed to prepare her for a subordinate role and by her own
inner conflicts and passivity. (1985: 137, italics added)

White’s metaphors of constraint even incorporate the bellicose image of besiege-

ment. Lissa Paul is similarly direct in her metaphors of entrapment: she uses the
metaphor of constraint to describe females in children’s and adolescent literature
as physically, linguistically, and economically entrapped (1987: 187–188).
The journey metaphor is nonetheless still present in the literary criticism of
female development: “Plot elements from the Bildungsroman may be put to a dif-
ferent use; for instance, the journey, which in the Bildungsroman is a vehicle for
vertical development, may become in the novel of adolescence an oscillation from
side to side” (White 1985: 13, italics added). Together with Annis Pratt, White also
identifies female growth as shrinking: they argue that the most conservative fic-
tions of female development commend the protagonist for “ ‘growing down’ rath-
er than ‘growing up’ ” (Pratt 1981: 14, italics added). The growth of the hero is
“halted,” with the female Bildungsroman “trac[ing] the heroine’s growth up to her
physical maturity to the neglect of her potential for further development,” so ac-
cording to Esther Kleinbord Labovitz, the nineteenth-century female protagonist
is on a foreshortened journey in which her growth is always stunted; her “quest
for self-development … disappears by virtue of the ambivalent endings (1987: 5,
italics added). Focusing on post-colonial novels, Christine Wick Sizemore defines
the female Bildungsroman as “the young girls’ search for adult roles amid … con-
flicting demands” (2002: 21, italics added). Elizabeth Abel, Marianne Hirsch, and
Elizabeth Langland (1983) define female development in terms of the journey,
albeit an interior-oriented voyage in which the search involves introspection; their
book devoted to the topic is entitled The Voyage In. All of these feminist critics
depict growth by relying on metaphors of physical movements, such as growth up
or down, (or growth that is halted), oscillation, and/or the journey, the voyage, the
quest, or the search.
In Patricia Meyer Spacks’ analysis, adolescence — especially female adoles-
cence — involves a dynamic of power and powerlessness in the context of in-
ter-generational conflict, such that the female adolescent character becomes a
metaphor for the “twentieth-century phenomena of alienation and experienced
powerlessness for all ages, all conditions: the adolescent girl thus provides a
metaphor for her elders as well as, on occasion, a target for their vindictiveness”
26 Literary Conceptualizations of Growth

(1981: 52). In Spacks’ model, growth is conducted in competition with controlling

adults, so maturation becomes a matter of “winning and losing,” although “[t]he
adolescent can win only conditionally as long as he or she remains adolescent”
(195, 196, italics in the original). According to Spacks, adolescence is defined in
terms of “[e]xploration, becoming, growth, pain” (4) — all of which are embod-
ied metaphors, and at least one of which, exploration, also ties into the notion of
growth as a journey. Girls gain power with their sexuality; boys with their ability to
increase their capital gains (196) — but adult authors include adolescents in novels
not necessarily written for young readers to “[expose] the barrenness of the adult
world” (288, italics added). Spacks piles metaphors on metaphors: growth involves
gaining or losing something; girls themselves are metaphors for powerlessness;
adolescents are contrasting metaphors for the barren landscape of adulthood.
Other critics demonstrate that males, too, experience growth as constraint and
loss — as an almost tangible sense of lost freedom, which Buckley observes: “quiet
intuition may restore as much of [the protagonist’s] lost freedom as is still recover-
able” (281, italics added). For Leslie Fiedler, growth is not an upward trajectory; it
is a downward fall from grace, which he describes in terms that demonstrate his
immersion in Judeo-Christian ideology: “An initiation is a fall through knowledge
to maturity; behind it there persists the myth of the Garden of Eden, the assump-
tion that to know good and evil is to be done with the joy of innocence and to take
on the burdens of work and childbearing and death” (1958: 22, italics added). And
I myself, for all I have insisted in an earlier work (Trites 2000) that adolescent lit-
erature is defined in terms of adolescents becoming adults more by learning about
social structures of power than by growth, even I have written about the genre us-
ing an ongoing series of embodied metaphors about forms of containment, such
as “curtailment” (14), “prison” (24), “pressure” (43), “powerless[ness]” (27, 76, 79,
119), and “repression” (16, 55, 141).
Geta Leseur makes a compelling case for the black Bildungsroman as a
genre particularly given to issues of constraint, loss, darkness, and even blind-
ness. In a study entitled Ten is the Age of Darkness, Leseur argues that the black
Bildungsroman shares with the white Bildungsroman the same narrative patterns
of journey, education, dealing with parents, finding a mate, and a vocation. But in
the black Bildungsroman, the hero finds a guide or mentor who teaches the youth
“a philosophy of darkness” (1995: 18).
As the hero or heroine reaches maturity, each will typically feel bondage, the mul-
tiple constraints of living, often represented by the pressures of the cruel city. The
creative vision, however, restores freedom, and the child’s questioning sense of
outward things is parent of the understanding child; the quickened imagination
outlives the troubled “season of youth.” (1995: 20, italics added)
 Chapter 1. Growth, cognitive linguistics, and embodied metaphors 27

Leseur acknowledges that gender affects the genre: “The Black boy who discovers
himself discovers that he is isolated in an alien society, where the journey to man-
hood is painful and will continue to be so, as long as he resides in a racially charged
society” (100, italics added), while the black female Bildungsroman “depict[s]
woman’s internal struggle to unravel the immense complexities of racial identity,
gender definition, and the awakening of their sexual being” (101, italics added).
Leseur demonstrates that protagonists in these novels are invariably “poised for
travel to another life” (194, italics added); motifs of being beaten permeate the
genre: the protagonists are not only “beaten in the old slave tradition,” but they
are also “metaphorically ‘beaten up’ in their lives” (199, italics in the original).
Thus, although the literary critic of the traditional (white, male) Bildungsroman
frequently depicts growth employing both positive and negative metaphors of
embodiment, critics writing about marginalized groups (people of color, women)
tend to employ more negative than positive images of embodiment. In these cases,
metaphors of growth represent the limitations of human embodiment — and of
human growth.
Nevertheless, as Barbara White observes, novels about growth rarely focus
solely on physical maturation. “It is significant that of the major themes critics
have identified in the novel of adolescence, only one — obsession with physical
change — has any direct relation to biological maturation” (1985: 14). Fictions of
female development have a greater emphasis on embodiment — both as maternal
body (White 1985: 17) and as a body situated within the “green world” of nature
(Pratt 1981: 17). Katherine Dalsimer defines physical maternity as the most signifi-
cant aspect of female development. “These works of literature suggest that at every
phase of female adolescence, and in every aspect — from the beginning changes in
the contours of the body, in the awakening of sexual feeling, in the forming of new
friendships and in love, in the making of those choices that will define, for that
individual, her womanhood — all of these developments take place in the context
of this continuing relationship” with the mother (1986: 140, italics added). Fictions
of female development require the female to be aware of herself — and her mother
— as a reproducing body. Yet when Pratt (1981) and Dalsimer (1986) talk about
maternity, they are speaking literally, not figuratively, about reproduction. Their
metaphors, however, tend to involve the type of physical metaphors that critics
also use to describe male patterns: women awaken to sexual feeling (Dalsimer
1986: 140, italics added); the “literary tradition” of female novels is “a barren one”
(White 1985: 21, italics added); the self has “roots” in a plant metaphor that evokes
the idea of maturation as a process of cultivation (Pratt 1981: 1, italics added).
Thus, critics describing literary patterns of adolescent growth typically rely on
one or more of the following embodied metaphors: (1) growth occurs while liv-
ing a life as if it followed a path on a journey, often in quest of a goal; (2) growth
28 Literary Conceptualizations of Growth

involves filling a life (particularly the mind) as if it were a container; (3) growth
entails cultivating a life as if it were a plant; (4) growth can be a matter of molding
or forming a life as if it were a sculpture; (5) growth is moving upwards, as if a life
could ascend into the sky or heavens; (6) growth is like awakening, as if infancy
and/or childhood are times of unconsciousness or sleep; (7) growth comes from
experiencing a revelation, as if life could be perceived as a visible object; or —
in more negative terms, (8) growth is a sort of freeing from imprisonment, as if
childhood is a cage (or conversely, increased constraint, as if adulthood represents
imprisonment); or (9) as a loss, as if growth is a sacrifice or shrinking or a mat-
ter of losing something specific, such as innocence. All of these metaphors share
in common their basis in the physical experience of the human body. Bodies go
on journeys; bodies are containers that can be filled and emptied. Bodies grow
upwards, as do plants, and although we need tools to sculpt or planes to fly, we
also understand these metaphors on a visceral level.8 We know what it is to wake
and sleep; many people know what it is to see; we know what it is to be caged and
to gain or lose something. These are not the only metaphors for growth on which
literary critics rely (growth as a “season” would be an alternative example), but
taken together, the metaphors I have traced here demonstrate how embodiment
affects our conceptualizations of growth — both literal human growth and the
discursive growth of narrative patterns such as that of the Bildungsroman. Clearly,
literary critics have a pronounced tendency to conceptualize maturation in terms
of human embodiment.

Fiction as an example: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn contains perhaps the most famous
U.S. example of an adolescent whose physical and embodied journey equates to
his psychological growth. Huckleberry Finn, who has been raised as a social out-
cast, feels uneasy with the mores of middle class society in the nineteenth-century
pre-Civil War South. Eventually, he helps a friend — Jim — escape from slavery.
They float on a raft down the Mississippi River, hoping to take a steamboat north
to freedom while experiencing many feuds, frauds, and betrayals. When Jim is
recaptured into slavery, Huck decides to help his friend escape a second time, even
though he believes this means sacrificing his soul for eternity. Huck’s old friend
Tom Sawyer, who turns up in the final chapters of the novel and proves to be
more of a hindrance than a help in Jim’s escape, finally reveals, however, that Jim
has been free all along because his owner — Miss Watson — manumitted him,

8. Lakoff and Turner identify “PEOPLE ARE PLANTS” as a “basic metaphor” (1989: 5–6).
 Chapter 1. Growth, cognitive linguistics, and embodied metaphors 29

prompted by feelings of guilt that she once tried to sell him downriver. Jim has
achieved his goal: he has attained freedom. But Huck can never attain the freedom
he desires, which is freedom from human cruelty and corruption. As the novel
ends, he flees to the Western territories, hoping to avoid the civilizing influences
of middle-class society. During his journey down the river, however, he has grown
out of being the type of callous lad who would play tricks on a slave to being the
type of young man who would help that slave escape to freedom.
At the beginning of the novel, Huck accepts the conventional wisdom of his
racist culture, most notably when he still believes that Miss Watson’s moral pro-
nouncements are valid. But she commits the betrayal that provides Huck with
his traveling companion when she tries to sell her slave, Jim. Huck solidifies their
relationship when he first insists that Jim flee. In this urgent message to Jim,
Huck employs an embodied metaphor: “Git up and hump yourself, Jim!” (Twain
2002: 75). The transitive nature of the reflexive colloquial verb “hump” demon-
strates its inherent embodiment: Jim’s brain needs to “hump” his body — that is,
curve his back in hard work — to get the rest of his body moving (Hump, v. 2013).
Significantly, Huck immediately joins his own physical plight to Jim’s: “There ain’t
a minute to lose. They’re after us!” (75). In point of fact, no one is after Huck
since the town believes his dead body lies drowned in the Mississippi River. These
embodied metaphors of flight, however, contribute to the primary metaphor of
growth as a journey. That metaphor continues right up to the novel’s conclusion,
when Huck decides he will “light out for the Territory ahead of the rest” (362). In
this instance, “light out” is another metaphor for escape, this time with its origin
in the idea of lightening a load (Light, v. 2012). Huck will physically journey to the
Western territories, but he will do so in rapid flight — as if the faster he travels, the
lighter he will feel. When Huck urges Jim to escape literal slavery early in the novel
by “humping it” and when Huck himself escapes the metaphorical confinement of
societal conventions by “lighting out” at the end of the novel, Huck perceives free-
dom in terms of embodied escape. The metaphor is a compelling image that joins
the concept of freedom with the physical ability to run away from confinement,
whether that confinement is the literal embodied imprisonment of slavery or the
metaphorical confinement of societal strictures.
Twain’s tendency to use the colloquialism “a body” when he means “a per-
son” further underscores how Huck’s embodiment structures his perceptions and
conceptualizations. For example, aboard the sinking steamboat The Walter Scott,
Huck listens to a band of thieves and expresses his fear entirely in embodied terms:
“a body couldn’t breathe and hear such talk” (83). Listening to these murderous
thieves, Huck is so afraid that he refers to himself as “a body” unable to breathe in
the presence of such a fearsome conversation. Soon thereafter, in one of his earliest
moral dilemmas, Huck has an internal debate about whether or not to reveal he
30 Literary Conceptualizations of Growth

is harboring a runaway slave. When he decides he cannot betray Jim, he thinks, “I

see it warn’t no use for me to try to learn to do right; a body that don’t get started
right when he’s little, ain’t got no show” (127, italics in the original). Twain’s use
of the colloquial term “body” as a metonym for the whole person demonstrates
Huck’s sense of his morality as embodied. The body cannot be separated here
from its moral decisions — or its actions. Later, when he watches two rapscal-
lions, the Duke and the King, take advantage of a young woman named Mary Jane
and her family, he thinks, “It was enough to make a body ashamed of the human
race” (210). Here, Huck blends his cognitive perceptions with embodied emotions,
demonstrating again how Twain uses language to represent the inviolable relation-
ship between Huck’s mind and body.
Huck’s understanding of religion also plays a role in his experience of moral-
ity — and moral growth — as embodied. He understands his spirituality in very
literal and embodied terms. Early in the novel, he discusses the afterlife with Jim’s
owner, Miss Watson. They debate the relative merits of heaven and hell as if they
were actual places to which the body journeys after life. Huck is bored enough
that he says to her, “I wished I was there” in hell (3) — which shocks Miss Watson
(3). She describes heaven as a place where “all a body would have to do there was
to go around all day long with a harp and sing, forever and ever” (4). Her defini-
tion of life after death is as embodied as Huck’s, what with the image of playing
harps and singing, but he then reinforces the idea of spiritual growth as occurring
on an embodied journey: “I couldn’t see no advantage in going where she was
going, so I made up my mind I wouldn’t try for it” (4, italics added). The notion
that hell is a physical place to which one journeys is echoed in the novel’s most
famous passage, when Huck decides “All right, then, I’ll go to hell” (271, italics in
the original). Several layers of irony accrue to this passage: most readers trained to
read for irony are aware that Huck will not go to hell for helping a friend escape an
institution as heinous as slavery. Most readers also understand that this decision
marks Huck’s moment of greatest psychological growth. Significantly, however,
Huck represents his initial moral decision, “not to try” to go to heaven in terms
of an embodied journey, just as he expresses his final moral decision in the active
terms of going on a journey. He will physically and spiritually go to hell for his
friend. Just as his journey down the river represents his overall growth, his deci-
sion about journeying to hell represents his spiritual growth — even though he,
ironically, believes himself to be a moral back-slider. Huck then describes spiritual
growth in another embodied metaphor, this time as a matter of cleanliness. As he
decides whether to help Jim escape from slavery, he feels “good and all washed
clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life” (269). He again feels
cleansed when he meets people who assume that he is Tom Sawyer, “it was like
being born again, I was so glad to find out who I was” (282). In this instance, Huck
 Chapter 1. Growth, cognitive linguistics, and embodied metaphors 31

experiences rebirth in terms of an entirely new embodiment, as if his identity is

solely a matter of his physical being.
Although the journey represents the most frequently employed metaphor for
Huck’s psychological growth in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, many other im-
ages, such as rebirth and cleansing, also provide metaphors for his maturation. In
yet another series of embodied metaphors, Huck presents growth as being a mat-
ter of work, that is, of physical labor. He asks, “[W]hat’s the use you learning to do
right, when it’s troublesome to do right and ain’t no trouble to do wrong, and the
wages is just the same? I was stuck. I couldn’t answer that. So I reckoned I wouldn’t
bother no more about it, but after this, always do whichever come handiest at the
time” (127, italics added). When Huck uses the term “wages,” he doesn’t literally
mean that he will be paid for his efforts; he is employing a metaphor that means
here “consequences”; rather, he recognizes that the consequences of doing right
will cause him as much emotional turmoil as doing wrong. The metaphor is rein-
forced when Huck uses the metaphor “handiest.” The Oxford English Dictionary
associates the term “handy” with manual labor that is done by hand (Handy, adj.
2012). Thus, Huck implies that moral decision-making is a matter of hard, man-
ual labor. Huck also associates morality with a physical ailment that makes him
sweat. At one point, he feels so guilty his conscience makes him feel “feverish” and
“scorched” (123); eventually, Huck’s “conscience got to stirring me up hotter than
ever” (124). Huck’s moral decision-making leads him to experience metaphorical
fevers, scorching, and heat in a way that anticipates his eventual decision to go to
the burning flames of hell for Jim’s sake. Nevertheless, the terms are embodied,
equating as they do a concept such as feeling guilty with a literal feeling of fever.
Huck’s growth also includes embodied images of risk-taking, physical safety,
and sight. For example, he thinks, “I reckon a body that ups and tells the truth
when he is in a tight place, is taking considerable many resks; though I ain’t had no
experience, and can’t say for certain; but it looks so to me, anyway; and yet here’s
a case where I’m blest if it don’t look to me like the truth is better, and actuly safer,
than a lie” (239, italics in the original). Again, Twain has used the word “body” to
mean “a person,” but Huck’s dilemma makes him feel as if he is in a “tight place.”
Thus, the concept of a moral dilemma is embodied here as physical entrapment,
and he conceptualizes resolving the problem as a matter of vision — “it looks so to
me” — with an embodied metaphor that is used twice in the same passage. Huck’s
goal is to feel safety from risk, and he cannot explain that concept without tying it
to his embodiment.
32 Literary Conceptualizations of Growth

Conclusion

Repeatedly in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck explains his perceptions and

experiences in conceptual terms that rely on his own embodiment. The concept
of maturation is mapped onto a physical journey; the concept of redemption is
mapped onto cleansing; the concept of moral decision-making is mapped onto
physical labor; the concept of escaping social strictures is mapped onto physical
escape. Huck cannot explain his world without using his body to do so. Lakoff
and Johnson (1980) would argue that this is because, through language, his cogni-
tion is shaped by his embodied experiences. But Huck, of course, does not really
have a body. He is a discursive construct — nothing more than a conceptualized
character whose expression manifests itself in language alone. Twain, however,
has himself relied on the embodied nature of cognition to create this character —
and he knows that his readers will understand these embodied metaphors because
they have experienced the conflation of mapped concepts of growth in their own
language development.
Even more important for the purposes of studying adolescent literature,
Twain relies on embodied metaphors in the way he represents Huck’s maturation.
Adolescents experience growth in very embodied ways: puberty triggers physical
changes in the body that have a profound emotional effect on most people as they
change from children into adolescents and then adults. Perhaps one reason that
authors who write for adolescents rely on embodied metaphors to represent matu-
ration includes the inherently embodied experience of puberty. More significant,
however, are the ways that language structures our cognition so that we describe
our perceptions and experiences in terms of what we know viscerally. I would
argue that this is a form of epistemology that is fundamental to the adolescent
experience: as children and adolescents, we know the world through our bodies
and because of our bodies. Moreover, our language has structured our cognition to
describe many concepts in terms of our embodiment. As a result, we understand
growth — both physical change and psychological maturation — in embodied
terms. Authors for children and adolescents rely on the brain’s preconditioned
neuro-circuitry when they map embodiment onto concepts of growth. In sum,
we know everything that we know through our bodies, so our epistemology is
embodied, perhaps during adolescence in very unique ways. We also use language
to express what we know — and we frequently use that language to map embodied
concepts onto abstract concepts.
At its most basic level, cognitive linguistics affords us the opportunity to inter-
rogate how the metaphors we employ manipulate our epistemologies — a concept
I will explore at greater length in Chapter 5. The embodied metaphors of growth
that proliferate in literary criticism, however, demonstrate how impossible it is to
 Chapter 1. Growth, cognitive linguistics, and embodied metaphors 33

separate psychological growth from embodiment (as it is represented discursively)

in literary studies. At one level, these embodied metaphors of journey and plant
cultivation and sculpting and awakening and constraint seem to belie the discur-
sive nature of fiction, but at another level, they affirm it. Our ability to conceptual-
ize growth is dependent on our concepts of embodiment and the language we use
to think about that embodiment. Metaphors of growth demonstrate how we use
the language of embodiment to ground fictional processes both cognitively and
physically. Lakoff and Johnson maintain that we do so because we have no oth-
er way of knowing the world than our bodies (1980: 3). We understand fictional
growth because of our own experiences with embodied growth, both physically
and psychologically.
 Chapter 2

Sequences, scripts, and

stereotypical knowledge

As I have demonstrated in Chapter 1, conceptualizations about growth are often

influenced and shaped by embodied metaphors. In this chapter, I will examine the
relationship between embodiment and narrative structure, specifically how cogni-
tion affects various aspects of narrative, because the interplay between cognition
and narratives about maturation is significant.
No one creates a text without employing either hands or mouth (or both);
no one experiences a text without perceiving it through eyes or ears or fingertips.
Even more important, no one experiences textuality without filtering it through
memories specific to that individual but influenced by his or her cultural context
— and those memories often trigger emotional responses. Cognitive narratolo-
gist David Herman defines “memory, perception, emotion” as three functions of
mind; all are required in the process of storytelling (2007: 312). F. Elizabeth Hart
describes how “the architecture and contents of the brain/mind” lend themselves
to the epistemological study of “what constitutes literary knowledge and knowing”
(2001: 319). How our brains process knowledge affects what our minds perceive
in literary texts. The cognitive study of narrative, then, insists on a rapprochement
between embodiment and post-structural theories of discourse. David Herman
puts it this way: cognitive narratology specifically bears “on the traditions of in-
quiry that locate the mind not in the heads of solitary thinkers but rather in socio-
communicative activities unfolding within richly material settings” (2007: 308).
Most important to the field of adolescent literature, cognitive literary theory
confronts and redefines the post-structural emphasis on discourse that has had
such tremendous influence on the study of adolescent literature. Discourse is al-
ways already culturally situated, and it tends to be studied as an external force, one
that acts upon people to shape their subjectivities. Cognitive narratology, however,
insists that the functioning of the human brain also plays a role in cultural produc-
tion. That is, human thought is shaped by both external (discursive) and internal
(cognitive) forces. As Karen Coats argues, childhood is a discursive construct — as
is adolescence —, but children and adolescents are embodied individuals — and our
field does well to recognize how such discursive concepts are inevitably linked to
embodiment (2001: 148–153).
36 Literary Conceptualizations of Growth

In other words, cognitive narratology provides a way to explore narrative as

the product of embodied beings while it simultaneously affects those embodied
beings, specifically allowing us to investigate how embodiment influences both
the author’s discursive creation of story and its subsequent meaning-making as a
function of the reader’s cognition in terms of language use, memory, perception,
and emotion. Herein, I will explore three aspects of cognition pertinent to matu-
ration in adolescent literature — stereotypical knowledge, sequences, and scripts
— all of which are both biophysically and culturally situated. Gene Luen Yang’s
American Born Chinese (2006) demonstrates how complex the relationships be-
tween stereotypical knowledge and scripts of growth are, while Margaret Mahy’s
Memory (1987) and Jay Asher’s Thirteen Reasons Why (2007) openly problematize
memory and its cognitive role in the storying process. At stake are interpretive
strategies that acknowledge embodied adolescent growth within the culturally-
defined discourses of adolescent literature.

Sequences, scripts, and stereotypical knowledge

A concept linking embodiment to cognition is the idea of scripts as a function of

experiential repertoires. According to Herman, our brain stores repeated physi-
cal actions as “structured repertoires of expectations about current and emergent
experiences” that occur in two types: static repertoires and dynamic repertoires
(2002: 89). Objects that remain stable over time constitute the domains of our
static repertoires, so this type of memory helps us distinguish a container from
a plant or an adolescent from an adult. Dynamic repertoires, on the other hand,
involve how we use domains to understand processes. Relying on the discourse of
computer science, cognitive narratologists refer to processes, or any short series
of events, as a sequence. For example, entering a house and eating porridge are
typical sequences that involve predicable processes. Events in a sequence happen
in a standard order: first someone is outside a house; then in the sequence, she
crosses the threshold. In a second sequence, she enters the house. Each process,
each movement, each action comprises a sequence.
Scripts, then, are dynamic repertoires comprised of a series of sequences.
According to Marek Oziewicz, “scripts are kinds of memory structure, para-
digmatic stories, serving as a way ‘to store knowledge that we have about cer-
tain situations’…. They form the basis of human understanding” (2011: 35);
Oziewicz draws this definition from the context of Knowledge Structure Theory,
an Artificial Intelligence (AI) theory advanced by Roger Schank. A script “is a
structure that describes an appropriate sequence of events in a particular con-
text…. a script is a predetermined, stereotyped sequence of actions that defines
 Chapter 2. Sequences, scripts, and stereotypical knowledge 37

a well-known situation” (Schank & Abelson 1975: 151). Entering a house and sit-
ting in three different chairs, for example, involves several sequences (entering,
sitting, standing, sitting again, etc.); eating from three bowls of porridge involves
three more sequences. But we know one particularized version of the script this
way: “Goldilocks entered the house. First she sat in three chairs; then she ate from
three bowls of porridge.” A script is “how a sequence of events is expected to un-
fold…. Scripts represent a sequence of events that take place in a time sequence”
(Mercadal 1990: 255). From the perspective of cognitive narratology, the idea that
the process is unfolding in an expected way is central to the idea of the script.
Moreover, dynamic repertoires are one of the brain’s many forms of short-
hand: rather than remembering the details of every set of behaviors we’ve ever
experienced (such as going to the dentist or the events of every school day), we
remember standard procedures conceptually and in generalized terms. Neuro-
typical brains store stereotypical knowledge about routine processes as a matter of
efficiency (Herman 2002: 89). We don’t remember every event that happens every
time we go to the grocery store, for example, but we do remember the pattern of
the grocery store: arriving outside the store, entering the store, getting a shopping
cart, etc. Herman describes “stereotypical knowledge” as events that are repeated
in such a way that we do not need to remember every repetition of the action.
For example, most school days have a predictable pattern, so our brains store “the
events of a typical school day” as “stereotypical knowledge” rather than remem-
bering every single minute and day that we spend in school (Herman 1997: 1047–
1048). Standard metaphorical mappings, such as “GROWTH IS A JOURNEY,” are thus
also a form of stereotypical knowledge. Cognitive narratologists, as Herman de-
fines himself, argue that our brains rely on this shorthand as a matter of cognitive
efficiency, so that we need not store in our memories every event or detail of every
concept that we experience (2007: 306). Rather, we remember most concepts as
stereotypical knowledge — that is, as generalized patterns of conceptualization,
such as “GROWTH IS A JOURNEY” or “MAKING A MORAL DECISION IS LABOR.”
Cognitive narratologists argue that embodied experiences, such as shopping
or attending school, influence our ability to understand narratives because our
brains know how to transform the basic unit (or “domain”) of dynamic repertoires
into story scripts that are tied to concepts. Thus, scripts are “knowledge represen-
tations” stored in the neurological cells of memory as finite groupings of causally
and chronologically ordered actions; we learn stories because we remember cer-
tain events as sequentially standardized (Herman 2002: 90). Scripts can be as short
as “what happens at a 4-way STOP sign” or as long as a fully-developed narrative
pattern, such as “what happens in a standard love triangle.” Our brains under-
stand, for example, that stories with three characters — such as “The Three Bears”
— will involve a series of dynamic repertoires (sitting in chairs, eating porridge)
38 Literary Conceptualizations of Growth

that are organized by a script that I call “the Script of Three.” That is, we know from
experience that the third character or third action in many groupings of three will
be the character who changes the pattern, in this case, eating porridge that is “just
right” or finding Goldilocks in bed: “And there she is!” Moreover, as John Stephens
argues, anticipating and completing the script within a narrative enhances the
reading experience: “When readers recognize the beginning sequence of a script,
they anticipate what is to come and derive satisfaction from how the text expands
the script by completing or varying the expected pattern” (2011: 15). All narratives
rely on readers’ cognitively stored scripts, but the scripts can be varied to create an
infinite number of story-lines.
Stephens demonstrates additionally that within the cognitive category of ex-
periential repertoires, scripts are comprised from schemas, which he defines as
follows: “Generally, a schema consists of a network of constituent parts, and the
stimulus evokes the network and its interrelations, especially what is normal and
typical about that network…. Whereas a schema is a static element within our
experiential repertoire, a script is a dynamic element, which expresses how a se-
quence of events or actions is expected to unfold” (2011: 14). By way of example,
Stephens describes either a dog on a frayed leash or a running cat as a schema
stored in our memories; when the dog breaks the leash and chases the cat, we ex-
perience a script of stereotypical knowledge: what happens when “dog chases cat”
(14–15, italics in the original). Stephens’ use of the term “schema” corresponds
to Herman’s term “static repertoire.” Both are ways of identifying static concepts
stored in the brain as stereotypical knowledge.
Cognitive narratologists are effectively employing Vladimir Propp’s basic idea
of a story function by expanding it to ask how linguistic and semiotic phenom-
enon within the story, such as metaphors and cultural narratives, influence the
reader’s “co-creat[ion]” of a text (Herman 2002: 98). Vladimir Propp ascribes to
the dramatis personae of a fairy-tale a function; that is, the function is an analysis
of what a character does in the way that that character “performs the same action”
in every tale (1968: 20). The issue is a structural one, according to Propp; that is,
it is a “structural feature” (22), and he identifies his work as “morphology,” that is,
the study of parts (xxv). Lévi-Strauss identifies Propp’s idea of the function as the
“constituents of the tale,” the “various plot actions” as those specific actions work
together to create the plot (1984: 170). A function is “act, behavior, action” (76);
moreover, “[a] function is designated simply by the name of an action: ‘interdic-
tion.’ ‘flight.’ and so forth” (170). Where Propp’s idea of the “function” differs from
cognitive narratology’s idea of the “script” is in where the analysis lies. Propp iden-
tifies function only as a textual feature and does not acknowledge the necessity of
human cognition for the function to be recognized. In other words, Propp does not
acknowledge that the memory of stereotypical knowledge is essential for a reader
 Chapter 2. Sequences, scripts, and stereotypical knowledge 39

to recognize what he calls function (but a cognitive narratologist would call script,
acknowledging the role of human cognition in the completion of story-meaning.)
So how, specifically, does embodiment affect the reader’s ability to discern
dynamic repertoires strung together to create scripts? All scripts rely on an indi-
vidual’s cognitive acts of perception and memory, which acts are both embodied
in a brain. For example, what some critics call archetypes — for example, the mon-
omyth of quest and initiation — are effectively stored in the brain as scripts. But
that monomyth could not exist without embodied understandings of conceptual
domains, such as birth, death, and rebirth; nor could it exist without a cultural dy-
namic that privileges that particular set of scripts. In cognitive narratology, scripts
gain significance both in how they rely on stereotypical conceptual knowledge
and how they vary that pattern. The narratological study of scripts in adolescent
literature, then, might well analyze the intersection between standard scripts (such
as “love triangles”) and how the embodied adolescent characters involved will in-
fluence the adolescent reader’s cognitive experience of that script. When readers
bring to the text an expectation that an adolescent character will grow, they are
using their own stereotypical knowledge (stored in their memories) to anticipate
a script of maturation, one that has likely been influenced by the pattern of the
Bildungsroman.
As early as the mid-1980s, some critics were puzzling through a basic un-
derstanding of scripts without necessarily employing that term. Lois Kuznets, for
example, analyzes a series of novels that “produced only a layer of realism im-
posed upon a stereotypical structure, which in turn rested upon an archetypal
base” (1984–85: 148). Citing her work, Perry Nodelman draws the conclusion
that the “apparent sameness” of children’s and adolescent novels results from a
recurring set of themes in children’s fiction, especially those that explore oppos-
ing ideas, such as “freedom and constriction, home and exile, escape and accep-
tance” (1985: 20). Kuznets and Nodelman are demonstrating two of the principles
of scripts: scripts rely on stereotypical knowledge, and authors change or vary
the script to affect the reader’s specific emotional responses. However, scripts are
usually based in embodied experience. Our memories store stereotypical knowl-
edge based on what our bodies do. Thus, Nodelman (1985) can perceive repeated
themes such as freedom/constriction or home/exile, but he does not identify that
authors depend on child and adolescent readers to understand those scripts as
a function of embodied stereotypical knowledge. Young readers know from em-
bodied experiences what constriction is; they also know from their bodies what
it means either to be at home or away from it. Authors for the young thus rely
heavily on embodiment and visceral memory when they string scripts together to
create narratives with protagonists who grow, which novels such as American Born
Chinese, Memory, and Thirteen Reasons Why demonstrate.
40 Literary Conceptualizations of Growth

Scripts and stereotypical knowledge in American Born Chinese

If we were to reduce scripts to their lowest common denominator, we would con-

sider them to be our brain’s very efficient way of storing processes as stereotypical
knowledge. And at their most basic level, we could use the concept of scripts to
analyze those aspects of any story that rely on the brain’s stereotypical knowledge
for the completion of the story. For example, myriad scripts intertwine to create
the three subplots of Gene Yang’s American Born Chinese, which combines the
Chinese myth of the Monkey King with stories about a lonely second-generation
Chinese-American boy, Jin, and an American boy, Danny, who is embarrassed by
his Chinese cousin, Chin-Kee. The novel is depicted in graphic narrative form,
which complicates even further how scripts are intertwined in the story because
some of the scripts are told pictorially while others are told alphagraphically —
and most of the scripts rely on a multi-media combination of both visual and
alphagraphic semiotics.
The story opens with a picture of gods and goddesses having a dinner party,
and that picture itself contains many scripts based in stereotypical knowledge. In
one quadrant of the page, a sequence of women smiling over peaches appears. In
another quadrant, a man smiles menacingly at a pretty woman. Two different con-
versations are occurring: “Your peaches are looking especially plump today, my
dear,” one old man tells a young woman attending the party, and a war god gloats
to another, “I don’t mean to boast, but that thunderstorm I put together last night
impressed even myself ” (Yang 2006: 7). The sequences in this picture are easy to
identify because we have basic stereotypical knowledge about what happens at
parties and even more narrow ideas, like what peaches are — what they taste like
and how to eat them. We also understand that a script is occurring: the old man is
making a sexual innuendo as he flirts with the pretty young woman, while in an-
other testosterone-laden act, the war god is verbally sparring with another warrior.
Yang is relying on so many forms of stereotypical knowledge in this one picture
alone that to count them all would be tedious, but he knows as an author that he
does not need to spell out for his readers what peaches are or how alpha-male
behavior unfolds. He knows he can trust readers to supply that information from
their own stereotypical knowledge.
Indeed, on the next few pages, ideas of masculinity and dominance take on
increasing significance, as the Monkey King decides to journey to heaven to join
the other deities in their party. Following a fairly predictable script, he is denied
entrance to the party, ostensibly because he has no shoes, but really because he is
a monkey. The Monkey King responds in typical alpha-male fashion, by wreak-
ing havoc on the other party-goers. Yang is spare in his use of alphagraphic lan-
guage: in the six pictures of the fight, only one alphagraphic sentence appears in
 Chapter 2. Sequences, scripts, and stereotypical knowledge 41

one dialog box: “But on second thought, he decided that perhaps saying one word
would make him feel better” (16, italics in the original). He then says, “DIE” out
loud (16), while the words “SMAK!” and “KRASH!” appear alphagraphically, em-
bedded within the pictures themselves (17). Although the Monkey King feels tem-
porarily gratified by his display of power, this portion of the story ends with him
feeling rejected and alone. Yang relies on the reader’s cognitive memory of facial
gesture to convey the Monkey King’s sadness.1
The Monkey King is creative in the way it brings together multicultural scripts
that are accessible to many readers. For example, the script of the Monkey King
story relies on Wu Cheng’en’s Journey to the West, which is set in the seventh cen-
tury CE, but alters the script to include the Monkey King visiting the baby Jesus
after his birth. The story of the lonely second-generation Chinese-American boy
Jin combines at least two scripts: Jin gains a friend, only to lose the friend in a
love triangle. The most complex of The Monkey King’s three subplots involves the
way that Jin has sold his soul to transform himself into the blond American boy
named Danny. Haunting his conscience is his embarrassing (and stereotypical)
cousin Chin-Kee. The character Chin-Kee plays like a character out of a situa-
tion comedy — and indeed, Yang relies on readers’ stereotypical knowledge about
sit coms when he frames his pictures with applause (“CLAP CLAP CLAP CLAP
CLAP CLAP CLAP CLAP CLAP”) and laugh tracks (“HA HA HA HA HA HA
HA”) (109, 110). This is an intricate device, meant to trigger readers’ understand-
ing that several of these scenes are purportedly funny — even though they rely
on such cringe-inducing images as a slant-eyed, buck-toothed, queue-wearing
Chinaman carrying Chinese takeout boxes as his luggage, while he exclaims with
glee, “HARRO AMELLICA!” (48). These images should trigger some level of
discomfort for any reader trained to understand that cultural stereotypes are of-
fensive, but stereotypes reside within cognition as part of our stereotypical knowl-
edge for a reason: cultural stereotypes involve thinking in patterns, not thinking in
discrete and discerning individualized moments. Moreover, cultural stereotypes
depend on an absence of the emotion empathy, as Danny’s inability to empathize
with Chin-Kee clearly illustrates.
Indeed, Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer identifies empathy as necessary to
mature “emotional competence” (2012: 130). Kümmerling-Meibauer argues that
YA novelists stimulate the reader’s empathy through at least two narrative strate-
gies: foregrounding and enhancement of awareness.

1. For more on human gesture, especially facial gesture, in visual narrative, see Nodelman,
Words about Pictures (1988: 101–124) and Nikolajeva, “Reading other people’s minds through
word and image” (2012: 273–291).
42 Literary Conceptualizations of Growth

Foregrounding refers to those literary passages and elements that are clearly
marked by the author (for example: code switching, unusual lexicon, neolo-
gisms, irony, different points of view, change of typography, contradictory asser-
tions) in order to emphasize certain emotional conditions, while enhancement
of awareness applies to literary strategies, such as overstatement, enrichment and
repetition, which draw the reader’s attention to the text’s seminal passages and
assertions. (2012: 131)

Yang relies on both foregrounding and enhancement of awareness to create the

stereotyped character Chin-Kee.
Cultural stereotypes are a specific type of stereotypical knowledge, which may
confuse the issue here because we so frequently refer to racism with the shorthand
term “stereotype.” And yet, by highlighting the failure of empathy and the stereo-
typical thinking involved in cultural stereotypes, Yang ultimately creates the type
of cognitive dissonance from which a perspective critical of these cultural stereo-
types can emerge. By the end of the novel, readers have been trained to recognize
that this type of short-hand knowledge and a concomitant failure of empathy lead
to prejudice, discrimination, and racism. They have also come to understand how
three seemingly unrelated scripts are indeed one: Jin learns from the father of the
best friend he has betrayed in the love triangle that his transformation into Danny
is only a self-deception. That boy’s father is the Monkey King himself, who has
been posing as the Chinese cousin Chin-Kee. He teaches Jin self-acceptance when
he says, “I would have saved myself from five hundred years’ imprisonment beneath
a mountain of rock had I only realized how good it is to be a monkey” (223, italics
in the original). The story certainly contains disturbing implications about the es-
sentialism of race, because at the end of the day, no one can escape their inherent
identity — in this case, as either a monkey or an Asian-American.2 Yang can only
tell this intricate story with such simplicity, however, because of the way he relies
on readers’ stereotypical knowledge to inform and complete the stories’ scripts
— both graphically and alphagraphically — by relying on readers’ awareness and
their memories.

Memory, perception, emotion and Margaret Mahy’s Memory

While cognitive narratologist Herman defines “mind” as a matter of the interplay

among “memory, perception, emotion,” he also acknowledges that storytelling

2. This idea was first suggested to me by Susan L. Stewart and was later reinforced by a confer-
ence paper given by Mike Cadden (2012), “But you are still a monkey: American Born Chinese
and racial justice.”
 Chapter 2. Sequences, scripts, and stereotypical knowledge 43

depends on all three of these cognitive processes (2007: 312). Perhaps no adoles-
cent novel does a better job of delineating storytelling’s dependency upon memo-
ry, perception, and emotion than Margaret Mahy’s Memory (1987). In the opening
chapter, a protest about Maori land rights turns violent, evoking how New Zealand
has lost its memory about the rights of that nation’s First Peoples. The plot then
centers around two specific people who are struggling with their own faulty mem-
ories: an elderly woman with severe memory loss and nineteen-year-old Jonny,
who is grieving the fifth anniversary of his twin sister’s death. He is haunted by
memories of the day she fell off a cliff to die on the rocks below. Early in the story,
for example, he notices of his own cognition, “Memory had flashed at him, but
its sudden pulse, densely packed with information, had gone right through him,
taking everything with it into darkness on the other side” (Mahy 2002: 41). As he
drunkenly tries to find his old friend Bonny, who was the only person aside from
himself to witness his sister’s death, he accidentally ends up at the house next-door
to Bonny, where a woman named Sophie lives. She has no memory at all because it
seems likely that she has Alzheimer’s. When Jonny recovers from his hangover and
blackout enough to realize that he has stumbled into the shadow world of Sophie’s
lost memory, “He did not know whether to be dismayed or grateful that his mem-
ory, like that of an erratic computer, had swallowed whole great pieces of itself ”
(62). Indeed, he has been drinking to forget what he remembers about watching
his sister die: “His head, overloaded with memories, had been naturally drawn
to a memory vacuum” (64). But as much as he is tortured by his own memories,
watching Sophie, he can’t help wondering if it’s better never to have lived “than
to wind up with broken memories,” living in abjection, as Sophie does (201). In a
moment when he fears for her well-being, he imagines “her lying at the foot of her
stairs with the very last of her memory seeping out through the crack in her skull,
barely staining the wood as it soaked away for ever. There wouldn’t be much mess,
there was so little memory left in there” (129). Sophie can tell him nothing about
her past because she no longer remembers her own story. Jonny finds her tragedy
more haunting than his own. Without memory, people have no stories.
Underscoring the cognitive nature of memory — and its relationship to the
significance of memory in the functioning of a computer — Jonny notices that
a computer company named Cognito Systems stands close to Sophie’s house (40,
italics in the original). Blending the idea of “cognition” and the idea of being “in-
cognito” — which, in some ways, seems to be an accurate description of the iden-
tity loss involved in Alzheimer’s — the computer company evokes both cognitive
science’s older metaphor of the brain as a computer and the importance of mem-
ory in cognition. Jonny contemplates “what would happen if he went into Cognito
Systems and tried to order a new memory for Sophie…. Though memories were
often regarded as careful files in a catalogue, Jonny now believed they could just
44 Literary Conceptualizations of Growth

as easily be wild stories, always in the process of being revised, updated, or hav-
ing different endings written on to them” (206). As Jonny reconciles himself to
his own memories, he understands that memory can be a shifting and unstable
cognitive process.
Perception, too, is problematized in Memory as a function of storytelling. In
the five years since his sister’s death, Jonny has begun to delude himself that he
actually pushed his sister off the cliff because she was taunting him. Her last words
were, “You’ll never catch up with me,” and after she fell, their friend Bonny told
Jonny to climb back to where she was standing, above a DANGER sign that the
twins had been intentionally ignoring (196). Jonny has put these two perceptions
together — of his sister’s last words and Bonny’s insistence that he move to where
she was standing — to convince himself that Bonny must have told him to lie
about where he was because she saw him push his sister. Jonny does not trust
his own perceptions — and he has sought Bonny out five years later to confirm
which of his two perceptions is right: either he pushed his sister to her death or
he did not. “I could remember not doing it,” he tells Bonny, “but I could remem-
ber doing it, too” (259). Bonny confirms that the girl “tripped. She tripped and
fell” (259). But Jonny asks, “Once you start thinking something like that … how
do you stop? It makes itself real” (259). He tells Bonny that the false memory,
“seemed truer than a lot of other things that really were true” (270). Memory and
perception — and misperceptions and false memories — become inseparable in
his narrative about his own past. Jonny begins to think of the false memory as a
“parasitic dream feeding on other guilty dreams” (270). Only once he separates
real memories from false memories can he begin to heal and outgrow the intense
emotionality of his grief (270).
Emotionology is the “system of emotion terms and concepts that people deploy
rhetorically in discourse to construct their own as well as other minds,” according
to Herman (2007: 321–322). All cultures and subcultures create an emotionology
— that is, a set of discourses by which we can talk about our brains’ emotions
and understand each other’s emotions, as well (2007: 322). Bonny understands
the emotionology of grief; she understands that Jonny is grieving; and she also
understands why he is heightening his own grief with a false sense of responsi-
bility. In contrast to Jonny, Sophie — who has lost her memory — has faltering
perceptions and a limited range of emotions. She is either happy and content or
frustrated and irritated. Her emotional register is limited because she no longer
has memories that guide her in her culture’s emotionology. Although she is still
instinctively kind, she seems to have lost her empathy; that is, she does not always
seem to register that Jonny has his own thoughts and emotions and perceptions
and memories. She assumes that they share exactly the same limited memories she
has. Although emotions are perceived on an individual level, we recognize them
 Chapter 2. Sequences, scripts, and stereotypical knowledge 45

and name them in a communal way, according to the discourses in which our
culture has immersed us.
Moreover, our perception of emotion depends on Theory of Mind, which is the
ability to understand that other people have emotions, too (Preemack & Woodruff
1978: 109–110). Clearly, Sophie no longer has Theory of Mind. Lisa Zunshine as-
serts that Theory of Mind “makes literature as we know it possible” because read-
ing fiction requires us “to invest the flimsy verbal constructions that we generously
call ‘characters’ with a potential for a variety of thoughts, feelings, and desires and
then to look for the ‘cues’ that would allow us to guess at their feelings and thus
predict their actions” (2006: 10). Maria Nikolajeva argues that multi-media texts
“can potentially teach even very young children to read other people’s minds”
(2012: 289), while Kümmerling-Meibauer asserts that YA novels trigger Theory of
Mind in that they “stimulate readers to reflect upon the protagonists’ emotional
development and to transfer this learning process to their everyday life experienc-
es” (2012: 138). Mahy’s characters Sophie and Jonny further illustrate this point:
Jonny’s focalization of Sophie’s inability to feel empathy reinforces what the reader
knows about the importance of empathy in creating human communities.
Cognitive scientists recognize that knowledge has a communal nature.
Influenced by Vygotsky’s (1933) recognition that knowledge is socially-rooted,
cognitive narratologists acknowledge that story, too, has what they call a distrib-
uted quality. As Herman observes,
Minds are spread out among participants in discourse, their speech acts, and the
objects in their material environment. From this perspective, cognition should be
viewed as a supra- or transindividual activity distributed across groups function-
ing in specific contexts, rather than as a wholly internal process unfolding within
the minds of solitary, autonomous, and de-situated cognizers…. Stories are often
about shared or collaborative cognitive processes. (2007: 319)

At the root of Sophie’s tragedy is the way that her loss of memory has made her
unable to participate in the communal process of storytelling. She repeats stock
phrases over and over, as if they are the closest she can come to remembering
scripts. She tells Jonny numerous times that she remembers “just the way” he likes
his tea (e. g. Mahy 2002: 53) and that it’s better to tidy up the dishes before bed and
that her late husband was “one of nature’s gentlemen” (e.g. 120). Her memories are
incomplete, and so are her scripts.
Echoing the issue of memory in this novel is the concept of muscle memory.
Jonny and his twin sister were the two members of a successful tap-dancing act be-
fore her death, and Jonny still loves to tap dance. Jonny remembers how bullies had
made him dance in his childhood. His “feet danced automatically at the memory
of it, for they had a twitchy sub-memory of their own” (101). He also smiles with
46 Literary Conceptualizations of Growth

“conditioned reflex,” because of his mother’s frequent admonition that he smile

(235), and when he confronts one of his childhood bullies as an adult, he again
experiences muscle memory. “As he smiled back he felt a twitch of old, left-over
terror, as people who have lost a leg are said to be able to feel the itching of toes
they no longer have. But it didn’t last. The memory of Nev was more frightening
than the real man” (141). In one of the final scenes in the book, Bonny and Sophie
watch Jonny dance, his muscle memory fully engaged and his false memories fully
exorcised. Bonny and Sophie “watched him change into a surreal man whose feet
stuttered like typewriters, though the story they wrote down vanished as soon
as it was told. It was too shy a story — too full of contradictions which cancelled
each other out — to stand being put into words” (265). The metaphor is embodied
and complex. Jonny’s feet have muscle memory — just as his brain muscles store
memories — that enable him to tell a story. And reclaiming accurate memories
has allowed him to heal, grow, and mature enough to tell himself a new life story.
But although cognitive memories aid in storytelling, muscle memory is not given
to the creation of a story that lasts. Muscle memory lives only in the moment, al-
though a typewritten narrative has the possibility of enduring much longer.
Memory plays a major role in narrative. At the most basic level, without
memory, we cannot remember what happened at the beginning of a story or keep
the characters straight. Moreover, narrative relies on our memories of stereotypi-
cal knowledge stored cognitively as scripts. Narrative memory requires us both
to have stereotypical knowledge stored in our brains and also to have a trigger
that evokes that memory: “recall is a joint product of the interaction between
general knowledge structures or expectancies and input information” or stimuli
(Norenzayan et al 2006: 533). Thus, according to cognitive psychologists, “a narra-
tive cannot be transmitted and achieve cultural success unless it stands the test of
memory” (Norenzayan et al 2006: 531–532). Scripts, of course, reside entirely in
the memory — and without that memory of scripts, stereotypical knowledge, and
communal emotionology, we would be able neither to predict nor focus on the
many scripts of growth in adolescent literature.

Causality, scripts, and Thirteen Reasons Why

Jay Asher’s Thirteen Reasons Why is also clearly predicated on the idea of scripts —
even though that is not a term Asher uses. The novel includes two narrators: Clay
and Hannah. Clay listens to — and comments on — the thirteen tapes Hannah
Baker has made to explain her reasons for committing suicide. Both Clay and
Hannah are first-person narrators, but Hannah’s voice in its tape-recorded form
is the more aural and recursive one, since other characters can listen to her voice
 Chapter 2. Sequences, scripts, and stereotypical knowledge 47

repeating the same information every time one of her tapes replays. Clay talks out
loud to her voice on the tapes, but the conversation is not dialogic because Hannah
can no longer answer him. Each of her thirteen reasons for killing herself involves
a narrative, usually motivated by the eleven people she identifies on the tape as
having affected her emotions negatively. Most of these narratives involve her em-
bodiment, particularly in the ways she feels objectified as a female. The tapes also
rely on dynamic repertoires as stereotypical knowledge patterns; that is, each of
the thirteen reasons relies on one or more scripts that are culturally familiar to
readers who are familiar with middle-class, suburban, Westernized high schools.
Issues of how adolescents experience embodiment in high school are central
to the thirteen scripts that inform Thirteen Reasons Why. The first tape Hannah
narrates — that is, the first script — involves a character named Justin and a varia-
tion on the “first kiss” script: Justin kisses her but then spreads rumors that she
is a slut. Other tapes include the scripts of a slap that is motivated by female vs.
female jealousy, a rape narrative, and a peeping Tom narrative. Moreover, another
character writes a “Who’s Hot/Who’s Not” list and gives her the “Best Ass in the
Freshman Class” award — which leads other males to feel that they have permis-
sion to objectify Hannah’s body in such ways as slapping her ass or voyeuristi-
cally watching her through her bedroom window (Asher 2007: 39–40). With every
chapter, Hannah narrates how that chapter’s script-and-variation occurs because
the specific details of her narrative alter slightly from the standard script about
embodiment that high school readers have likely internalized. For example, the
girl who has slapped her over female vs. female jealousy is the girl who gets date
raped — while she is drunk — at a party. The script of the drunk-girl-getting-
raped is also a fairly standard (and very embodied) script. What alters the script
here is the fact that Hannah and the drunk girl’s boyfriend (who has also been the
first boy to kiss Hannah) stand by, knowing that Jessica is getting raped. They do
nothing about it, which adds to Hannah’s sense that her life is futile.
Each chapter is identified with one character and a standard script that plays a
clear cognitive function meant to trigger the reader’s conceptual domain of a cer-
tain emotion or moral dilemma. The story, however, avoids the totality of clichés
that thirteen scripts could lead to by providing a variation on the standard script in
each case. While I have identified only one or two conceptual domains per script,
others could also be identified. When the narrator herself analyzes the emotionol-
ogy involved in the script, I have quoted her words. (See Table 1).
Table 1 demonstrates Asher’s reliance on stereotypical knowledge and the
emotionology of high school. These scripts can be as simple as “first kiss” or as
elaborate as “what happens when a girl gets in a hot tub with a known rapist.”
Asher, like all authors, employs scripts to trigger the reader’s specific neurologi-
cal responses, usually in the affective domain. For example, when one boy steals
48 Literary Conceptualizations of Growth

Table 1.
Character Script Variation Conceptual domain
1. Justin Foley First kiss He spreads rumor that “Betrayal” (13) and
Hannah is a “slut” rejection
2. Alex Standall “Who’s Hot/Who’s Not” Objectification of “Revenge” (40) and
list (Hannah has “best Hannah’s body by anger
ass”) other males
3. Jessica Davis Named “Worst Ass in She slaps Hannah and Jealousy
the Freshman Class” ends friendship
4. Tyler Down Peeping Tom Hannah loses sense of Invasion of privacy
security at home
5. Courtney Crimsen Helping catch Peeping Courtney lies to “Pettiness” (145)
Tom others, claiming that
Hannah owns many
sex toys
6. Marcus Cooley Taking advantage of a Hannah knocks him “Distrust” (145)
perceived “slut” onto the floor
7. Zach Dempsey Stealing someone else’s Hannah has been ask- Resentment leads
rights (in this case, a bag ing for help but cannot a male to isolate a
filled with affirmations) receive it because of female
this theft
8. Ryan Shaver Stealing someone else’s Hannah’s poem gets Betrayal of trust and
intellectual property; analyzed in English invasion of privacy
the school editor steals classes at the high
Hannah’s poetry school
9. Clay Jensen Boy loves girl; girl loves Hannah still plans to Apology and sense
(who is the narrator) boy kill herself of guilt for commit-
ting suicide
10. Justin Foley Refusing to get involved Hannah also refuses Watching evil with-
(while girl gets raped) to get involved; Bryce out stopping it
rapes Jessica
11. Jenny Kurtz Careless teenaged driv- Jenny knocks over a Avoiding responsi-
ing STOP sign in her car; bility
another teenager dies
because it is missing.
12. Bryce Walker Sex In A Hot-tub Despite knowing he Abdicating personal
has raped Jessica, power
Hannah allows the act
13. Mr. Porter Asking the school guid- He tells her to “move Irresponsible insen-
ance counselor for help on” sitivity
 Chapter 2. Sequences, scripts, and stereotypical knowledge 49

a school mailbox designed to help students receive hand-written notes of positive

reinforcement, Hannah feels a combination of emotions, including anger and dis-
belief, but the reader is encouraged to feel frustrated, wondering why Hannah has
not confronted the boy. When Hannah has sex with someone she knows is a rapist,
she is feeling resignation at the inevitability of her situation, but the reader is being
invited to feel anger in protest of her self-imposed helplessness.
The range of emotions may differ between the character and readers’ respons-
es — especially because each reader’s experiences and memories are personalized.
But the concept of scripts is important to youth literature because so many scripts
are based on stereotypical knowledge, including cultural stereotypes. For instance,
few high school students are unaware of such cultural phenomenon as the objec-
tification of the female body and date rape — both of which empower males at the
expense of females. Most high school readers have internalized those stereotypical
actions in their cognition as a script or set of scripts that contribute to the larger
cultural narrative of differential power between the genders, but how the reader
responds depends on his or her experiences.3 Asher relies on narratives that objec-
tify the female body with at least two purposes: to inspire the reader’s anger and to
instruct male and female readers about how to reject this type of sexism.
Not surprisingly, Asher embeds many embodied metaphors into the scripts
he uses in Thirteen Reasons Why. For example, Hannah feels like the many people
who have been examining her ass and assuming she is a slut are dissecting her life.
Asher thus maps “dissection” onto “futility.” Mapping “dissection” onto the affec-
tive domain “futility” requires the reader’s cognitive action — but the metaphor is
employed with repetition to ensure the cognitive mapping process can occur. For
instance, when the school’s newspaper editor steals one of her poems and pub-
lishes it anonymously, the English teacher allows students to “dissect” the poem in
class (189). “So,” Hannah asks, “did your teachers dissect me properly?” (191). The
poem includes lines about opening a body to look inside of it:
Take away
this mask of flesh and bone and
see me
for my soul

alone (191)

Hannah does not want to be dissected for her body parts; she wants people to see
her “soul.” She feels as if she is “breaking” (211), and she describes her “tumbling

3. I decided to quit teaching Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak (1999), for example, after witness-
ing the extreme emotional responses of two female students in the classroom who later self-
identified as rape victims.
50 Literary Conceptualizations of Growth

heart” (100). When her suicide is announced at school, one of the cheerleaders is
dissecting an earthworm, “scalpel in hand, an earthworm sliced down the middle
and pinned open before her” (133). This is the same cheerleader who has run
over a STOP sign — which leads to a fatal accident in which a senior at their high
school is killed. On the tenth tape, Hannah accuses this cheerleader of both negli-
gence and avoiding responsibility in that death — and her own. These metaphors
of being dissected — and disembodied — underscore Hannah’s script about her
own death. She feels that her body and therefore her life have no possible teleology
other than immediate death. The dissection is complete, too, because Hannah’s
voice now exists as a disembodied echo in Clay’s cognitive process: “her voice will
never leave my head,” he asserts (3).
The embodied metaphors in Thirteen Reasons Why intertwine with a variety
of scripts to establish Hannah’s growing belief that suicide is her only option. For
example, she describes “her heart and her trust” as being in the “process of collaps-
ing” (159); “[a]nd that collapse created a vacuum in my chest. Like every nerve in
my body was withering in, pulling away from my fingers and toes. Pulling back
and disappearing” (160). In terms of a script, she is not growing; she is “wither-
ing.” On the final tape, she feels entirely “lost” and “empty” (271). The latter phrase
echoes the embodied metaphors demonstrated by theorists of the Bildungsroman
that depict the human brain as a container and knowledge or emotion as the con-
tents that fill the container. But Asher twists this metaphor, representing Hannah’s
failure to grow as a script of being emptied by life, rather than filled by it.
Asher also reverses the usual depiction of growth as a journey in depicting
Hannah as “lost.” In many adolescent novels, the embodied metaphor GROWTH
IS A JOURNEY itself becomes a script; the pattern ranges from Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn to the latest coming-of-age road trip movie. In a typical version
of the script, an adolescent experiences a crisis and either undertakes a journey to
escape the crisis or to find a way to overcome it. Either way, by the end of the novel,
the teenager has both journeyed and grown. But in this case, Hannah feels that she
can no longer follow the appropriate path of GROWTH IS A JOURNEY. For example,
her guidance counselor, failing to observe her depression, suggests that she should
“move on,” as if she can simply journey past the emotional pain she is feeling (278).
Asher includes several variations of the GROWTH IS A JOURNEY metaphorical script
in two pages that repeatedly employ the concept of the journey: the counselor tells
her to “move on”; Hannah rephrases the counselor’s words, asking if he thinks she
should “move beyond” these events and then stating that she should “get on” with
her life (278–279). The guidance counselor is “letting me go,” she says in a final
moment of despair (279). Eight times, then, the guidance counselor and Hannah
talk about life as an embodied journey, although the guidance counselor cannot
understand that Hannah is refusing to continue this journey.
 Chapter 2. Sequences, scripts, and stereotypical knowledge 51

The character Clay, however, follows the more traditional script of the journey
as growth. Indeed, in the first chapter, Clay fears the journey onto the curving
sidewalk that leads to his school; the fear of this journey is reaffirmed at the end of
the novel — but he nonetheless follows this path that he dreads (3, 284). During
Clay’s quest to find out what has happened to Hannah, he follows a map she has
given him, and he both walks and drives throughout their town as he seeks more
knowledge. He also grows to be more sensitive to other people’s needs. Although
his quirky classmate Skye makes him uncomfortable and he is “relieved” not to
talk to her mid-way through the novel, once he recognizes her withdrawn be-
havior as potentially suicidal, he consciously befriends her in the final chapter of
the novel (105). Clay’s journey is thus a fairly standard bildungsroman construc-
tion about psychological maturation following the path of a journey, but Hannah’s
journey — or failure to journey — is chilling because the reader knows from the
beginning that the path she is following does not end in growth but in death.
Asher succumbs to some fairly obvious didacticism about suicide — after all,
few YA authors can write about teen suicide without including messages about
the moral responsibility of everyone involved, including the suicidal person. One
of Clay’s friends acknowledges, “We’re all to blame…. [a]t least a little” (233),
and Clay is later grateful that this friend “understands what I’m listening to, what
I’m going through” (239), although he knows that many people will be “angry at
Hannah for killing herself and blaming everyone else” (280). The students at the
school discuss a list of warning signs about suicide as a thinly veiled means of
helping the reader understand the embodied nature of suicidal thoughts: the text
identifies sudden changes in appearance or giving away personal possessions, for
instance, as possible scripts for suicidal tendencies. Hannah even professes her be-
lief that “some people are just preconditioned to think about [suicide] more than
others,” positioning suicidal tendencies as a neurological — rather than a social
— response to life’s difficulties (253). Given that most of the reasons Hannah kills
herself involve how people have objectified her body in response to her sexuality,
Asher is clearly providing teenaged readers with an alternative mapping of gen-
dered objectification: don’t do it. Or protest when it happens to you. Or someone
else. Ideologically, Asher wants readers to understand that objectification is a se-
ries of scripts that influence stereotyped behavior; objectification is a construct,
not an unavoidable biological imperative.
Thirteen Reasons Why requires the reader to identify “connection” as this text’s
metaphor for combining the thirteen scripts into one narrative. Hannah narrates
on one tape, “And the closer we get to the end, the more connections I’m discover-
ing. Deep connections. Some that I’ve told you about, linking one story to the next”
(177). Here “connections” are tied to causality; Hannah understands that one se-
ries of cause and effect has precipitated subsequent series of causes and effects. She
52 Literary Conceptualizations of Growth

narrates, “this is one tight, well-connected, emotional ball I’m constructing here”
(183), and she tells Justin on the final tape, “I circled your name first, Justin. And
I drew a line from you to Alex. I circled Alex and drew a line to Jessica, bypassing
names that didn’t connect…. My anger and frustration with all of you turned to
tears and then back to anger and hate every time I found a new connection” (217).
Hannah describes time as “a string connecting all of your stories,” with the party
being “the point where everything knots up…. getting more and more tangled,
dragging the rest of your stories into it” (239). This metaphor of connection and
causality implies something about how stories work cognitively. Through Hannah,
the narrative instructs readers that it is their job, as readers, to rely on their own
memories to cognitively connect and untangle the knots — that is, to combine the
metaphors and scripts, the causality and the emotionology — that work together
in any story. In other words, Thirteen Reasons Why demonstrates how all narra-
tives function: novels are always a series of interconnected scripts that require the
reader to remember and make connections to complete the text’s meaning.
Hannah even comments on the inferential “gaps” that those who listen to her
tape must complete:
Yes, there are some major gaps in my story. Some parts I just couldn’t figure out
how to tell. Or couldn’t bring myself to say out loud. Events I haven’t come to
grips with….
But does that diminish any of your stories?….
No.
Actually, it magnifies them. (201)

She is acknowledging the importance of inference in storytelling — and in lit-

erary analysis (201). For example, in an intertextual commentary on “The Red
Wheelbarrow,” Hannah directly explains how literary ambiguity works: “Each
word, specifically chosen, could have a million different meanings. Is it a stand-in
— a symbol — for another idea? Does it fit into a larger, more hidden metaphor?”
(175); either way, “[i]t’s up to the reader to decipher the code, or the words, based
on everything they know about life and emotions” (175, italics added).4 This text
thus acknowledges how interpretive inference emerges from the reader’s cogni-
tion. Hannah also comments on the narrative importance of memory as another
cognitive function with significance for storytelling: “If there’s one thing I’ve still
got, it’s my memory” (223). Hannah retains cognitively the ability to remember
and causally connect the stories in her memory into one larger narrative; other-
wise, she could not be a storyteller. Because Hannah can remember the scripts

4. For more on intertextuality within the context of cognitive narratology, see Herman
(2002: 92). For more on the acculturating function of intertextuality in children’s literature, see
Stephens (1992: 85–86).
 Chapter 2. Sequences, scripts, and stereotypical knowledge 53

and connect them causally, her cognitive work parallels the reading process that
requires readers of most novels to be the active agent who makes inferences and
combines scripts. Thus, Thirteen Reasons Why foregrounds the relationship be-
tween embodiment and cognition: Hannah’s story emerges from both her embod-
ied experiences and from the embodied cognitive processes — such as inference,
memory, and understanding causality — that allow her to tell her story.

Conclusion

Cognitive narratology does not privilege embodiment over discourse, but it does
invite the literary critic to understand how embodiment influences discourse
through conceptualizations, such as how cultural narratives about teen suicide
might be represented by embodied metaphors in a YA novel. Mark Turner notes,
“[t]he cognitive study of art, language, and literature is concerned with patterns of
thought and patterns of expression and the nature of their relationship” (2002: 9).
A cognitive narratology of adolescent literature therefore investigates embodied
patterns of thought (or domains) as elaborated patterns of expression (or scripts)
that exist in the discursive construct that is adolescence. Readers must rely on
those cognitive functions — such as memory, perception, and emotion — to ana-
lyze causality in every story; and all of these cognitive functions work together to
communicate about emotionology and the communal nature of storytelling.
Perhaps the focus in adolescent fiction on growth represents cultural fears of
what happens when we stop growing taller and start aging into ever-more limited
embodiment. When we are children, our embodied growth represents privilege to
us, but in adolescence, embodiment becomes more problematic. We can’t always
control our bodies: our acne, our budding breasts, our erections, our menstrua-
tion. Thus, in adolescent literature, growth is represented in far more complex
terms than it typically is in children’s fiction. Authors may remember their em-
bodied adolescent growth as complex and often negative and thus represent that
growth within the discourse of their stories using semantic features that trigger
adolescent readers, who are themselves experiencing growth that is at times less
than pleasant, to respond cognitively based on their embodied dynamic reper-
toires and the scripts they have experienced as embodied beings.
But not all protagonists in adolescent literature grow into the next phase of
life: Hannah Baker dies. So does the first-person narrator of Libba Bray’s Going
Bovine (2009). And that phenomenon isn’t new, either. Alice dies in Go Ask Alice
(Anonymous, 1971); Adam Farmer can’t grow, but must bicycle eternally in cir-
cles in Robert Cormier’s I am the Cheese (1977). In one sense, authors who defy
the traditional narrative pattern of adolescent fiction are manipulating the script
54 Literary Conceptualizations of Growth

of the maturing adolescent to new and unusual effect, and in another, they are
demonstrating the biophysical reality that embodied beings die — even some-
times when they are very young. It is in examining the patterns of those novels
that violate the scripts of growth in adolescent literature that the blended relation-
ship in adolescent literature between script and metaphor becomes most clear. In
much YA fiction, embodied metaphors are the script. That is, growth — especially
psychological growth — is the norm, although authors rely on an infinite variety
of embodied metaphors, such as the journey or voyage, to depict that growth.
Adolescent literature depends on these embodied metaphors to depict growth so
often that one of the frequent assumptions readers bring to the genre is their be-
lief that protagonists will arrive successfully at their metaphorical destination and
grow, not die. The frequency with which metaphors of embodied growth are em-
ployed in the genre reinforces readers’ expectations that the predominant script of
any novel with an adolescent protagonist will include growth. Although authors
can rewrite the script with a protagonist who dies, they still cannot escape the
overpowering concept in adolescent literature that adolescent embodiment equals
a script of psychological growth. Thus, adolescent literature participates in an on-
going reinforcement of social norms that growth is expected of all adolescents.
As Stephens observes, scripts are “vital cognitive instruments” that “prove to be
widely powerful strategies for investing normative cultural ideas” (2011: 34).
Cognitive narratology offers literary criticism more complex ways to exam-
ine growth in children’s and adolescent literature than either narrative theory or
genre theory alone have previously offered the field. Just as adolescents do not
grow in a one-size-fits-all pattern, many narratives written for young adults defy
the predictable pattern of the bildungsroman-influenced novel about a maturing
teenager. We can trace these differences — and similarities — by examining the
way narratives rely on our cognitive processes, such as memory, perception, infer-
ence, understanding causality, and emotions, to encode our physical and cognitive
experiences of growth as stereotypical knowledge and/or scripts that subsequently
emerge in adolescent literature.
Ultimately, growth provides the dominant pattern in adolescent literature be-
cause it is a phenomenon we know within our very embodiment. Our internal-
ized knowledge of neuro-circuitry thus plays a major role in concepts of narrative
growth. If our minds script what our bodies know, it seems inevitable that psy-
chological growth would become the predominant model in literature written for
people experiencing the greatest biophysical growth of their lives.
 Chapter 3

Blending and cultural narratives

As I hope has become clear from the previous two chapters, the study of adolescent
literature shares with cognitive narratology a focus on the intersection between
physical embodiment and cultural construction. That is, childhood and adoles-
cence are biologically-influenced stages of life that are nonetheless also structured
by cultural constructions via the mechanism of language. To deny the biological
processes involved in growth would be absurd. And even worse, to focus solely on
those biological features of development would be to essentialize the human body,
reducing it only to its anatomy. The field of adolescent literature therefore shares
with cognitive linguistics an acknowledgement that biological and cultural factors
both affect growth within a life stage such as adolescence.
The interrelationship between embodiment and cultural construction can be
exemplified by examining, for example, the way every culture treats the embodied
infant differently, with varying rituals and ways of dressing the baby, with differ-
ing ways of managing the baby’s feeding and waste, with myriad ways to protect
the newborn and nurture it. The same is true of the adolescent body. Although
adolescence is defined in many cultures by the onset of a biological phenomenon,
puberty, how adolescents are treated in any given culture is entirely a matter of
social construction. Just as every culture constructs infancy differently, so too does
every culture construct adolescence differently — including those historical cul-
tures that did not even recognize adolescence as a legitimate life stage, such that
pubescent children are or were sometimes plunged at young ages into work and/or
marriage. Adolescence is defined solely by neither biology nor social construction;
it is defined by both. In particular, adolescence is defined by how a culture blends
its conceptualizations of puberty and post-pubertal embodiment, the process of
living in the teenaged years, and the transition from childhood to adulthood. This
chapter, then, explores the relationship between blending and the creation of cul-
tural narratives, with particular attention paid to the role scripts and embodied
metaphors play in the creation of these cultural narratives. Novels under analysis
as examples include Angela Johnson’s a cool moonlight (2003), Monica Hughes’
Keeper of the Isis Light (1980), Neal Shusterman’s Unwind (2007), and Meme
McDonald and Boori Monty Pryor’s Njunjul the Sun (2002).
56 Literary Conceptualizations of Growth

Blending

Blending is a cognitive process that occurs within the brain, residing in a neuro-
physiological process that is largely influenced by cultural factors that serve as the
stimuli triggering the blend. The idea of adolescence is therefore a blend of many
concepts that include, at a minimum, the following: biological concepts of puberty;
social constructions of adolescence; religious and social rites of passage (such as bar
mitzvahs or acquiring driver’s licenses); economic factors that define the adoles-
cent’s ability to work or not; educational constructs of adolescent learning styles that
include, in many European and/or Anglophone countries, middle school and high
school models; and psychological concepts of cognitive capacity, such as Piaget’s
belief that the ability to understand “formal operations” (or abstract thought) marks
the beginning of adolescence. The concept of adolescence is inevitably itself a blend.
According to Mark Turner, “conceptual blending is the mental operation of
combining two mental packets of meaning — two schematic frames of knowledge
or two scenarios, for example — selectively and under constraints to create a third
mental packet of meaning that has new, emergent meaning” (2002: 10). Blending
is a cognitive process; the embodied brain is required to process the blend (Turner
2002: 15). Our brains create blends both consciously and unconsciously in every
moment, whether we are awake or sleeping. Blending, also referred to as “concep-
tual integration,” is:
… a general cognitive operation on a par with analogy, recursion, mental mod-
eling, conceptual categorization, and framing. It serves a variety of cognitive
purposes. It is dynamic, supple, and active in the moment of thinking. It yields
products that frequently become entrenched in conceptual structure and gram-
mar, and it often performs new work on its previously entrenched products as
inputs. (Fauconnier & Turner 2002: 133)

In their work together, Fauconnier and Turner emphasize the following qualities
of the blend: the blend is not inherent in either of the two or more concepts from
which it emerges (42); blending happens unconsciously and without effort (44);
and blending is a cognitive concept on which humans depend in every interaction,
although they rarely recognize the process at work (56–57). Because our every
thought process includes some form of conceptual integration or mapping, we are
frequently unaware that we are engaged in the process of blending (Fauconnier &
Turner 1998: 133).
Most significant, for the purposes of adolescent literature, “[b]uilding the blend
requires composition, completion, and elaboration” (Turner 2002: 11). In other
words, blending in literature occurs because of the author’s composition of the
text, the adolescent reader’s cognitive act of reading, and that reader’s imaginative
 Chapter 3. Blending and cultural narratives 57

process of elaborating the blend into a new meaning. In an argument that is surely
also true for adolescent literature, Turner argues that blending “is a mainstay of
children’s literature” (2002: 12). Turner uses Crockett Johnson’s Harold and the
Purple Crayon to illustrate his point:
Harold uses his purple crayon to draw, and whatever he draws is real. His world
is a blend of spatial reality and its representation. In the blend the representation
is fused with what it represents…. Child Harold’s blended world has new kinds of
causality and event shapes that are unavailable from either the domain of drawing
or the domain of spatial living. (12)

Turner argues that human’s “central” cognitive capacity is this “advanced ability
for conceptual integration,” noting that blending involves embodiment, language,
and culture (2002: 16). We cannot study blending with discourse alone; nor can we
study blending if we ignore socio-historical context. But perhaps most important,
we cannot study blending, either, if we ignore embodiment altogether. In ado-
lescent literature, blending is particularly implicated in the relationship between
embodied metaphors and cultural narratives of growth.
Monika Fludernik describes blending this way: “Blending consists in fusing two
scenarios together and thus creating new meaning effects…. In particular, … blend-
ing theory aims at combining metaphor and narrative under one cognitive umbrel-
la. Metaphor and narrative have been regarded as constitutive nonscientific modes
of human cognition,” but they are “like Saussure’s signifier and signified: through
blending, narrative approaches a situation in which one scenario merges with an-
other, while in metaphor (generally acknowledged as a case of blending) the su-
perimposition of two scenarios evokes narrative sequences” (2010: 926). Metaphor
and scripts both involve blending; that is, they are cognitive actions that require the
reader to combine two concepts or two processes to create a new meaning.

Blending in a cool moonlight

Angela Johnson’s a cool moonlight demonstrates how cognitive integration of em-

bodied metaphors and scripts occurs in adolescent literature. In this novel, African-
American author Angela Johnson depicts the coming of age of a young girl, Lila,
who has a fatal disease: xeroderma pigmentosum. “xp,” as she calls it, is “because
of my chromosomes. they can’t protect me from the sun. i could be burnt and
even go blind if the sun gets to me” (2003: 8).1 As some sort of compensation for

1. The text of a cool moonlight relies only on lower-case letters; no word in the book is capital-
ized, although I have taken the liberty here of capitalizing the characters’ names.
58 Literary Conceptualizations of Growth

living her whole life either indoors or during the night-time, Lila has two friends
— Elizabeth and Alyssa — who appear and play with her only at night. They wear
fairy wings and are presented ambiguously as either imaginary friends or guardian
angels. That is, they follow either the script of imaginary friends, in which a child
imagines friends the child outgrows when s/he no longer needs them, or Elizabeth
and Alyssa follow the script of guardian angels, who protect children sometimes
from death and sometimes during their process of dying. Elizabeth’s and Alyssa’s
presence in the story is never independently confirmed by any other character;
that is, no character other than Lila expresses consciousness of these characters.
Nonetheless, Lila asserts that her wing-wearing friends “[know] all the things that
i need to know about the night. how to run in the night, find flowers in the night,
and to listen in the night to everything that most people call quiet” (6). In Lila’s
case, her skin condition may well be an embodied metaphor. That is, although
the race of her family is textually ambiguous, xp may well be a metaphor for race
in this novel.2 Racists, after all, justify their behavior on the condition of the per-
ceived color of the “other’s” skin; it is the primary factor by which racists in the
Americas have for centuries justified lynchings and murders and slavery and the
life-shortening conditions of enforced poverty. Certainly racism has killed more
Americans than xp has. Because of her skin, Lila, too, cannot live in the world as
the equal of those who define her world’s norms — and her skin pigmentation (or
lack thereof) is slowly killing her, just as racism has killed millions of Americans.
She will not outgrow xp; indeed, she may never even reach adulthood at all. In
being both a literal disease and an embodied metaphor for racism, xp serves as a
cognitive blend in a cool moonlight.
Lila longs to have a day in the sun, and she plans throughout the novel to spend
a milestone of her growth — her birthday — outdoors during the day. Readers un-
derstand that she is living in denial and that such a day would kill her. She hides
her plans from her overprotective family, although Elizabeth and Alyssa help her
gather articles for her “sun bag” to help her. The objects in the bag are metaphors
for what Lila desires, what she lacks in her life, which is primarily sunshine. The
objects all glow or glitter — except for “two golden feathers that are so small, so
soft that they have to be from fairy wings” (127, italics added). These sun-evok-
ing objects are also blends that require the reader to connect each physical object
with Lila’s emotional yearning for the sun. As Lila slowly accepts the condition of
her skin, however, she eventually abandons her friends — whether they are being
scripted as imaginary or angels. She is following the script of adolescent growth:

2. Virginia Hamilton’s Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush (1982) is another YA novel in which a skin
disease — porphyria — serves as a metaphor for racism as an insidious social disease by which
the dominant culture justifies its actions based on the condition of some people’s skin.
 Chapter 3. Blending and cultural narratives 59

she can leave behind her imaginary/angel friends because she no longer needs
them.
Lila’s family then holds a birthday party for her at night. They decorate the
backyard in twinkling lights — but magically, hundreds and thousands of fireflies
show up on this August night in Ohio to help Lila celebrate her special coming-
of-age party. Lila extends her arms, and the fireflies start to land on her, blinking
and twinkling: “everybody stands there with their mouths wide open…. i’m the
moon girl with fireflies. i’m all lit up” (130). She closes her eyes and starts to twirl,
and the fireflies — magically, impossibly — continue to cling to her arms, lighting
her up and transforming her into someone with glowing skin. The blend is, like
xp, both literal and metaphorical because she has become radiant on both a literal
and a metaphorical level.
As the novel ends, Lila decides that she doesn’t need to be a “sun goddess”
because “there’s nothing wrong with moon girls” (133). This brush with magic
demonstrates to Lila that she can exist — she can be — in the world in a different
ontological space than the one she has formerly inhabited. She can refuse to think
of her disease as a disability; she accepts herself with a new embodied metaphor.
No longer longing to be a “sun goddess,” she is happy to be a “moon girl.” Johnson’s
use of metaphor problematizes race by showing how a girl can transform her own
script to become someone who no longer feels limited by the embodied condition
of her skin. The metaphorical message to all readers is a very direct: no child should
ever be limited by the condition of her skin. Johnson leaves to the reader the task
of uncoding the complicated blend these embodied metaphors and scripts create.
But readers thinking about the symbolic value of xp in this book are performing
a cognitive act of blending, as is the case when any reader contemplates symbolic
value in any literature. Significantly, within adolescent literature, this cognitive act
of interpreting embodied metaphors almost always interacts with the narrative’s
scripts to advance the novel’s ideological purpose. Ideology functions on so many
complex levels that it is always implicated in the cognitive process of blending.

Cultural narratives as cognitive blends

Acknowledging the relationship between biology and culture, cognitive narratolo-

gy focuses on how narratives rely on embodied cognitive acts — such as language
use, memory, perception, and imaginative production — as they are structured
by specific cultural contexts. For example, cognitive narratologist Lisa Zunshine
(2002) analyzes Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s Hymns in Prose for Children (1781) as a
text in which children are socialized into an eighteenth-century theological belief:
i.e., that children are born with the inherent ability to pray. The text’s socialization
60 Literary Conceptualizations of Growth

process relies on mapping a system of metaphors that requires the reader to adapt
one conceptual domain to another (Zunshine 2002: 130). If domain-specific con-
ceptual categories are the internalized codes in our brains by which we identify
objects in terms of their function, then all birds are birds (even if one is purple
or another has only one leg), and “water” can be a drink or a stream or rain or
an ocean or a puddle. Our brains thus understand the domain-specific category
“bird” as more particularized than the category “water.” Zunshine demonstrates
how Barbauld manipulates several different conceptual domains to influence the
reader’s cognition toward a specific goal that is at once pedagogical and ideologi-
cal: in Barbauld’s Hymns birds and streams pray to God, even though praying
belongs to a different domain-specific category than either birds or streams. The
child reader must cognitively fuse these two categories (praying and birds or
streams) in order to internalize the theological belief — the ideology — that all
things are made to praise God. Zunshine argues that “as an effort to influence hu-
man beings, ideology will always be attuned to the intricacies of human cognition”
(2002: 126).
This ideological act, in which blends create new domains specifically aimed
at manipulating a reader’s belief system, involve what cognitive narratology re-
fers to as cultural narratives. Cultural narratives have been called by many names:
master narratives, metanarratives, dominant cultural ideologies, or even stereo-
types; Zunshine herself refers to them as “cultural representations” (2002: 126). In
his Introduction to The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard provides one definition of
the metanarrative: “if a metanarrative implying a philosophy of history is used to
legitimate knowledge, questions are raised concerning the validity of the institu-
tions governing the social bond: these must be legitimated as well. Thus justice
is consigned to the grand narrative in the same way as truth” (1984: xxiv). In this
construction, cultural narratives rely on historical understandings of culture to le-
gitimize contemporary attitudes towards that culture. Additionally, Stephens and
McCallum refer to metanarratives as “a global or totalizing cultural narrative sche-
ma which orders and explains knowledge and experience” (1998: 6). Within cog-
nitive narratology, cultural narratives refer to the widely-held belief systems that
require a minimum of two cognitive acts to be sustained: the memory of stored
stereotypical knowledge and a triggering cultural context. Cultural narratives “tap
into certain cognitive contingencies that arise from the constant interplay between
the human brain and its environment” (Zunshine 2002: 126). We cannot learn to
be patriotic or practice a certain form of spirituality — nor do we learn to become
sexist or racist — unless we have had our cognition shaped by repeated cultural
influences that our brain stores, for efficiency’s sake, as stereotypical knowledge.
Cultural narratives, then, are our cognitively-stored and culturally reinforced
scripts about status, power, and constructed social roles.
 Chapter 3. Blending and cultural narratives 61

For example, Monica Hughes’ Keeper of the Isis Light explores how damag-
ing three specific cultural narratives are: narratives of colonization, narratives of
lookism, and narratives of racism. Cultural narratives of sexism are implicated in
these processes, as well. The protagonist, Olwen Pendennis is the Keeper of the Isis
Light, something of a lighthouse for space ships, on the planet Isis. She was born on
Isis — so she is metaphorically an indigenous person — but her Earth-born par-
ents died when she was young, leaving her in the keeping of a sentient robot called,
simply, Guardian. Olwen thinks of Isis as “mine and it can never harm me in any
way,” demonstrating her colonialist attitudes toward the land (Hughes 2000: 88).
She later repeats the statement with emphasis: “Isis is mine. Mine” — as if anyone
can own an entire planet (125). When new colonists arrive from Earth, Olwen los-
es her unique status of being in control of the planet; she thinks of their presence as
an “invasion,” even though the settlers are initially peaceful (84). Guardian tells her
he is worried about the germs these Earthlings carry, so he will build her a “pro-
tective suit” (31), which Olwen says makes them sound “as if they were diseased
or something. Dangerous” (31). They are, indeed, both diseased and dangerous,
just as European settlers in the Americas were, because they are infected with de-
structive notions of colonial power, race, and stereotypes of beauty. Olwen almost
immediately recognizes that without the mask that Guardian has given her, “she
would be completely vulnerable” in the face of the new colonists’ tribalism (56).
When she first makes friends with one of the teenaged colonists, Mark, he
finds it surprising that she’s never looked in a mirror (62). She asks Guardian why
they’ve never had one, and she asks him if she is beautiful. Guardian — who alone
can see what lies below her mask — answers, “I think so” (66, italics in the origi-
nal). Later, Mark mentally compares Olwen to an Andean Indian who has grown
“acclimatized to high altitudes after centuries of living there”; he himself is like the
“conquering Spaniards” who “were able to survive” (89). But because the wives of
the Spaniards could not acclimate, they did not “bear healthy children, and so in
the long run the Indians won” (89). Mark has established the significance of physi-
cal appearance and of acclimation — and thinks of the latter as a matter of “win-
ning” over indigenous peoples.
The reader — and Olwen — eventually learn that her Guardian has genetically
modified her body to withstand the radiation and inhospitable living conditions of
Isis. Her skin is thicker; she has an extra eyelid; she has an elongated ribcage and
widened nostrils to help her process more air; her hands have been strengthened
and now include claws, and her skin is a bronze shade of green. Olwen thanks
Guardian for giving her “freedom” on Isis, which she equates with “happiness”
(138), but she eventually comes to understand that the new colonists consider her
ugly. Indeed, once Mark sees her face, he feels “irrational horror” and can only
think of her as an “alien species,” even though they are both human (100, 213). The
62 Literary Conceptualizations of Growth

embodied metaphor of the Other as alien is blended with a script of fearing — and
needing to destroy — the alien Other.
Not only is Mark enacting lookist cultural narratives; he is the person who de-
termines the nature of his relationship with Olwen and what level of intimacy they
will share. He holds all the power in their relationship. Once he rejects Olwen, they
can never be equals. The gendered pattern of Mark setting the terms of their rela-
tionship is replicated in Olwen’s relationship with the Captain in charge of bring-
ing the group to Isis. He tells her that he is now in charge of Isis, echoing her own
ridiculous notions of colonial power — and emphasizing the cultural norm that
men should be in charge. The omnipotent Guardian, too, is coded male because
even though robots are not sexed biologically, humans almost always configure
them as gendered.
Ultimately, The Keeper of the Isis Light underscores the tenacity of the “episte-
mology of the visual,” as Robyn Wiegman identifies racism and gender (1995: 8).
We humans make snap judgments about race and gender based on what we see,
what we perceive, about another person’s race and gender. Although both race and
gender are socially constructed and are not defined solely in terms of the visual,
the epistemology of the visual surfaces the reality that what we see leads to our
cognitive categorization of people by race and gender. In other words, our percep-
tions lead to a cognitive categorization that, in time, can become racist and/or sex-
ist. Before Mark sees Olwen’s face in Keeper of the Isis Light, he does not think he
can love her: “Love?…. I’ve never even really seen her, he told himself angrily” (92,
italics in the original). Olwen feels the same thing. “I want Mark to see me, to know
me, not a plastic imitation,” she says in a phrase that quite clearly links the visual
to epistemology (103, italics in the original). Later, Olwen concludes that the set-
tlers know only what they see: “They think that because you’re ugly you must be
dangerous” (160). She admonishes the settlers for killing her pet because they do
not know what type of animal it is: “He couldn’t help looking the way he did, you
know” (173, italics in the original). Hughes understands that lookism — which is
inherently linked to racism and sexism — is an epistemology of the visual.
The Keeper of the Isis Light thus blends lookism with racism and colonialism.
If we do not perceive the Other as different — in this case, as alien — we cannot
convince ourselves that we have the right to dominate the Other. The same is true
of sexism. The Keeper of the Isis Light is very direct about problematic cultural nar-
ratives and how frequently they rely on cognitive blending that is too often visual.
No cultural narrative exists as a single, unified cognitive thought. They always in-
volve blends based on the knowledge that repetitions of experience have stored in
our memories as stereotypical knowledge. And when the blend involves the belief
that one group has the right to dominate another, stereotypical knowledge col-
lapses into destructive stereotypes.
 Chapter 3. Blending and cultural narratives 63

Cultural narratives and embodied metaphors in Shusterman’s Unwind

Neal Shusterman’s Unwind appears to rely on competing ideologies, emphasized

by the novel’s use of embodied metaphors and cultural narratives. The novel de-
pends on two dominant and opposing cultural narratives, stated here in their ex-
treme versions: the sectarian argument that bases “pro-life” arguments in ideas of
the sanctity of human life (because even the fetus is made in the image of God,
Imago Dei), and the secular “pro-choice” argument of Naturalism that there is
nothing beyond life other than Nature itself. Shusterman maps two competing
networks of metaphors onto these cultural narratives: mechanical metaphors cor-
respond to the pro-choice cultural narrative and organic metaphors correspond to
the pro-life cultural narrative.
Embedded in Unwind’s metaphors is an inquiry into the neurological nature
of sentience through which Shusterman invites adolescent readers to consider
whether the human soul can be defined entirely in terms of self-awareness. The
text also appears to be taking a neutral stance on competing cultural narratives
about abortion, but an examination of how these narratives are employed reveals
Shusterman’s ideological orientation.
Set in a dystopic future following culture wars that have turned into literal
wars, Unwind describes a world in which abortion is both illegal and never prac-
ticed — because when children turn sixteen, their parents are legally allowed to
have them “Unwound.” The narrative is focalized by three characters: Risa and
Connor, who are runaways, and Lev, whom Connor has kidnapped as a hostage,
but who becomes sympathetic to Risa and Connor’s cause. Risa and Connor and
Lev have all been designated to be Unwinds. An “Unwind” is an adolescent whose
entire body (or at least 99.44% of it) will be vivisected during a two-hour surgery
so that the individual body parts can be given as tissue and organ donations to
people who need transplants.
The allusion to an Ivory soap advertisement implies that the Unwinding
process is, like the soap, “99.44% pure.” Unwinding exists as a cultural practice
that has emerged as a compromise between the “Army of Life” and the “Army
of Choice”; the resulting Bill of Life “was supposed to protect the sanctity of life.
Instead it just made life cheap” (Shusterman 2007: 53). In other words, “Both sides
lost” (181). Risa asks “[w]as it worse … to have tens of thousands of babies that no
one wanted, or to silently make them go away before they were even born?” (115).
Then the text raises the stakes even higher, asking about the nature of the human
soul, “What happens to your soul when you get unwound?” (171). In other words,
what happens when a body is still 99.44% alive but its organs and tissue and blood
and limbs are all living in other bodies? Does the soul live or die?
64 Literary Conceptualizations of Growth

Unwind explores several explanations of the human soul, but the two that cre-
ate the greatest tension in the narrative reflect the dialectic between a sectarian
cultural narrative involving the sanctity of life and a secular cultural narrative of
Naturalism. At least one character in the book reflects the view that the body of
an Unwind is mechanistic, meant to service others, and “never had a soul to begin
with” (172); that is, this character argues that the body of Unwinds exists only for
mechanical purposes, because she believes that these people never can or will par-
ticipate in any transcendent spiritual experience. The narrative’s opposing defini-
tion of the soul argues that the soul of each Unwind lives on — either parasitically
or symbiotically — in every part of the Unwound body that has been transplanted
into other bodies so that the “divided spirits could rest, knowing that their living
flesh was spread around the world, saving lives, making other people whole” (68).
This latter view reflects the twenty-first century sectarian cultural narrative in the
U.S. that all human life has sanctity at all moments. Shusterman thus engages ado-
lescents in controversial — and sometimes irresolvable — cultural debates, and
he relies on two recurring sets of metaphors to exemplify these debates. Both sets
of metaphors are mapped onto the human body: one set of metaphors depicts the
body as a machine meant to be sacrificed; the other relies on animal and plant met-
aphors to emphasize the organic (and presumably sacred) nature of embodiment.
Two characters exemplify the position that all embodied life is sacred: one
boy, named Cy, has received the transplanted right temporal lobe of an Unwind
whose inarticulate memories haunt Cy and lead him to uncontrollable behaviors,
such as kleptomania. Another character, Humphrey Dunfee — whom the text
identifies overtly as a metaphor for Humpty Dumpty (106) — has been Unwound
by parents who have later turned remorseful and gathered together all the many
people who were recipients of their son’s body parts. Hundreds of people gather
at a party the Dunfees hold for those to whom their son’s life has been donated —
and by the end of the party, all of the pieces of Humphrey converge into one uni-
fied consciousness that “coalesces into a single conversation” (334). Shusterman
makes clear that the most important thing about a soul is its sentience. As one of
the focalizers decides in a moment of crisis, “Whether or not souls exist Connor
doesn’t know. But consciousness does exist — that’s something he knows for sure”
(172, italics in the original). Later, he tells a group of escaped Unwinds, “I don’t
know what happens to our consciousness when we’re unwound…. I don’t even
know when that consciousness starts. But I do know this…. We have a right to our
lives!…. We have a right to choose what happens to our bodies!…. We deserve a
world where both those things are possible — and it’s our job to help make that
world” (333). Here, Shusterman has sidestepped the issue of defining a human
soul by focusing instead on the easier and more cognitive issue of consciousness.
Nonetheless, the tension between human sentience and perceptions of body parts
 Chapter 3. Blending and cultural narratives 65

as insentient recurs throughout the narrative. Our legs, for example, don’t appear
to have sentience — but we know that our legs, like our hands, have muscle mem-
ory. The text seems to speculate that neurological function connects all parts of
our bodies to our sentience — and possibly our souls. This exploration of neurol-
ogy, brain function, and sentience places the novel squarely within the interests of
cognitive narratology.
The two sets of competing metaphors about the nature of humanity on which
Shusterman relies are not unlike the two ways cognitive science has historical-
ly viewed the brain: in one set of metaphors, Unwind metaphorizes the human
body as technological, like a computer; in the second, it is organic and therefore
of greater intrinsic value. The whole concept of being “unwound” is based on a
metaphorical mapping of the human body as mechanistic, as a clock or timepiece
that can be turned back, as if that body has never existed. Other mappings of tech-
nological metaphors onto embodiment in Unwind include how one girl refers to
her own pregnancy as a matter of being “uploaded” (65) and the textual fact that
all Unwinds are “government property” (57). Another example involves Connor,
who has such severe impulse control behaviors that his parents have signed the
orders for his Unwind. He thinks of his impulsivity as “a dangerous mental short
circuit”; he can “feel when his brain started to fry” (62). He blames himself for his
“short-circuit stupidity” (64). His father has even asked him, “Why do you have to
get wound so tight?” (94). Connor is a “loose cannon” (212). Once the runaway
Unwinds find shelter at a junkyard for old airplanes, they find themselves “scanned
like groceries at a checkout counter. Scanned and processed” (182). Moreover,
abandoned airplanes line the grounds “like crop lines, a harvest of abandoned
technology” (197). The Unwinds, too, are abandoned — and according to many
of these metaphors, they have no more worth to their society than the parts that
comprise a junked airplane. In these metaphors, the living beings become technol-
ogy and technology becomes organic, as if the airplanes — instead of body parts
— could be harvested like wheat.
Another of the focalizers, Lev, eventually turns himself into a terrorist —
called a “Clapper” — whose blood has been infused with an inflammable toxin
that makes him able to blow himself (and others) up just by clapping his hands
together in an act of random “chaos” meant only to wreak havoc (230). Metaphors
that depict his body in mechanical terms foreshadow how he will transform his
embodiment into a bomb. For instance, before he has become a Clapper, Lev tries
to walk away from police officers who are looking for Unwinds “like he’s crossing a
minefield” (60). Later, he worries his heart will “explode” in his chest, “threatening
to detonate” at any second (76, 77). His memories are like “a ticking time bomb in
his head” (130). Lev is motivated to join the Clappers because his anger is “like the
deadly charge lurking in a downed power line” (230). His heart has “hardened” so
66 Literary Conceptualizations of Growth

much that he “wishes it could be hard enough to be diamond instead of crumbling

jade” (281). When he gives in to his feelings, they arrive “in a sonic boom” (329).
More than any character in the novel, Lev’s embodiment is transformed — not just
metaphorically but also literally — from the organic to the technological.
Cy, the character whose right temporal lobe causes him to have a split per-
sonality, however, blends both technological and organic metaphors. He feels like
there is “oil and water in this brain of mine” (184) and that his “mind will spill
out of his ears and down the drains of the streets” (185); the patch job in his brain
is “like puttin’ spackle over a hole in a wall” (126). But Lev tries to give Cy hope
using metaphors of living beings, comparing his friend to a “salmon swimming
upstream” — even though both boys know that sometimes a bear is waiting to eat
the salmon at the end of the journey (184). In a metaphor about ghosts — who are
neither organic nor inorganic — Cy claims that the Unwind whose brain he shares
is “like those ghosts that don’t know they’re dead” (140). Nevertheless, once Cy
confronts the grief and remorse of the Unwind who “donated” his temporal lobe,
Cy’s metaphors return to the technological. His “entire brain seizes. He’s frozen in
a total system lockup” (190–191). Eventually, Cy recovers — and joins the protest
movement against Unwinding, even testifying about the atrocity of the process to
Congress.
But meanwhile, Connor and Roland demonstrate Unwind’s blending of an-
imal and plant metaphors to convey the cultural narrative that embodiment is
ethically complex. As Zunshine argues, humans have a tendency to view “natu-
ral kinds, such as animals and plants” in terms of anthropomorphized qualities
and human-made artifacts in terms of their “function” is a result of the cognitive
process of domain-specific cognitive adaptations (2002: 129–130). Following this
pattern, Unwind uses these metaphors to interrogate whether all life is sacred sim-
ply because it is life. The domain-specific categories of “plants” or “animals” are,
Zunshine would argue, a cognitive shorthand process of storing information in
categories so that the brain can quickly access entire domain-specific categories of
experienced memories (2002: 130). Thus, when Shusterman uses plant or animal
metaphors to describe embodiment, he is asking his reader to map (quickly) an
entire domain of the reader’s experience — plants or animals — onto the value
of human life. For example, Roland — the power-hungry antagonist with whom
Connor fights for dominance throughout the narrative — has a shark tattooed on
his arm, in the text’s most obvious and overplayed embodied metaphor. “Sharks,”
the text asserts, “have a deadly form of claustrophobia. It’s not so much a fear
of enclosed spaces as it is an inability to exist in them…. [B]ig sharks don’t last
long in captivity” (100). That Roland is a shark-who-cannot-be-contained empha-
sizes the tension between his embodied power and the limitations placed on him
by that body effectively being imprisoned by the designation “Unwind.” Readers
 Chapter 3. Blending and cultural narratives 67

know what a shark is, and they can quickly map the embodied shark on Roland’s
arm onto the shark-like nature of his personality. But Roland is a sociopathic bully.
Does he deserve to live — or is he a shark who deserves to die?
Evoking the standard metaphor of growth as cultivation, the botanical meta-
phors in Unwind are plentiful. Connor changes from being a “bad seed” (71) to
someone with growing thoughts: a “seed” that is “planted in Connor’s mind” finds
“fertile ground” — even if those thoughts aren’t an accurate assessment of his situ-
ation (207). Readers map “seed” and “fertility” onto the concept that Connor is
growing, just as they know Connor is a trouble-maker when he thinks of him-
self early in the novel as a “coyote” (10) or when he thinks that he is so far into
the doghouse that his name might as well be “Fido” (66). Later, he describes his
impulsivity as feeling “like I’ve got ants crawling inside my brain” (145). Readers
can map the crawling, tickling feeling of an ant into an itch in the brain and un-
derstand how uncontrollable Connor’s urges are. The domain-specific categories
of plant and animal thereby correlate with complex questions about the sanctity
of Connor’s life. The metaphors used early in the novel of canines and ants imply
that Connor’s life is troubled and perhaps not sacred, while the later metaphors of
growing plants indicate his life is fertile and worth saving. But both sets of terms
are blends that involve Connor’s embodiment: he is growing, despite the ant-like
itch in his cognition.
Connor’s growth requires him to go “beyond his first thought, and [process]
his second thought” (59). One adult asks him to write a letter about how he feels,
so he writes to his parents about his sense of betrayal that they have decided to
have him Unwound. He cries, certain that the intense pain he is feeling will “kill
him right here, right now” (110), and in the aftermath of his tears, while he is
holding a friend’s baby so she can write her own letter, Connor thinks, “if his
soul had a form, this is what it would be. A baby sleeping in his arms” (112). The
soul is tender, vulnerable, embodied — and alive — in this metaphor. As Connor
grows to appreciate his own consciousness and his ability to rely on reason in his
decision-making, that is, once Connor learns some measure of self-control over
his impulses, the metaphors that describe him emphasize his ability to assume
agency as a living being. For example, the authority figure who runs the sanctuary
in which he hides — ironically called “the Graveyard” in an embodied metaphor
that foreshadows the fate of the Unwinds — tells Connor to become the person
who will “ferret out the wolf in the herd” (218), and another Unwind calls him a
“busy little worker bee” (220). When Connor feels futility, however, he feels “like a
part of himself has already been cut out and taken to market” (302). Connor is no
longer the coyote-like predator he once was, although he recognizes that being an
Unwind makes him little more than a calf being led to slaughter. Shusterman uses
several conceptual domains here (canines, graveyards, stockyards) as cognitive
68 Literary Conceptualizations of Growth

shorthand that adolescent readers can readily access in their own cognitive pro-
cess of reading.
Eventually, Connor and Risa and Lev end up at a “harvest camp,” where or-
ganic metaphors are mapped onto a domain of suffocation because the workers
at the camp participate so consistently in the cultural narrative that the Unwinds
have functionality but no souls. The adolescents are at the camp to be Unwound,
their body parts “harvested,” as if these teenagers were crops. Workers there wear
Hawaiian shirts — and one counselor’s shirt is covered with so many “leaves and
pink flowers” that Risa would like “to attack her with a weed whacker” (268). In
contrast to the strangling plant imagery of the harvesters, Risa is assigned to play
the piano to entertain other Unwinds; the metaphors emphasize her humanity:
she “plays her heart out” (276), playing the “pulse-pounding sound track of the
damned” (285). She is not a crop to be harvested precisely because she has a beat-
ing heart. Even more disturbing then these metaphors, however, are those used
when another character undergoes the surgery to become Unwound. The sur-
geons wear “scrubs the color of a happy-face” (288). Medical personnel replace his
blood with a fluorescent green “oxygen solution” — which is the color of mecha-
nistic “anti-freeze” but which also emphasizes that he is entering a vegetative state
(290). The yellow-clad doctors lean around his body as it is getting dismembered
on the table, “like flower petals closing in” (291). As his brain is dismembered,
“memories bloom, then they’re gone” (292). That same day, Lev and another group
of Unwinds take a nature walk in the harvest camp compound. They find a tree
onto which various employees of the camp have had branches “grafted” from their
“favorite trees” to the trunk of the tree, so that one “branch sprouts pink cherry
blossoms, and this one fills with huge sycamore leaves. This one fills with purple
jacaranda flowers, and this one grows heavy with peaches” (295). No one can re-
member what type of tree it was originally, although the employees call it the “tree
of life” (295). Adolescent readers are invited to map the concept of “harvesting”
onto “embodiment” so that Shusterman can make an ideological point about the
horror of viewing humans only as body parts to be harvested and grafted onto
people more deserving than society deems the Unwinds.
Hands — both the hands of Clappers and the detached hands of donors — pro-
vide another type of embodied metaphor mapped onto unusual cognitive domains
in Unwind. The first adult who helps Connor, for example, has a transplanted arm
and hand that has been “grafted on at the elbow” (13). The fingers have “muscle
memory” that allow him to shuffle cards one-handed and perform various card
tricks (14). The relationship between transplanted body parts and neurological
sentience are thus established early in the narrative. Soon after, Risa’s first piano
teacher tells her “I see those hands playing in Carnegie Hall,” which seems like a
compliment until she realizes that, as an Unwind, the hands may well play there
 Chapter 3. Blending and cultural narratives 69

without her (21). The teacher is being literal, not metonymic. Additionally, when
Risa first meets Connor and he touches her, he agrees to her demands, including
“[h]ands off ” (46). Later, when an entire neighborhood participates in infanti-
cide, Connor believes they all “had a hand in killing it” (75). These hands are all,
of course, dismembered hands in a commentary on the neurological connected-
ness of all body parts. Eventually in the text, however, hands become less about
dismemberment and more about empowerment. For example, readers learn that
Humphrey Dunfee’s hand was scarred while he was trout-fishing as a nine-year-
old — which another character, who has part of Humphrey’s brain remembers
with excitement. Symbolically, when Connor receives a grafted right arm — one
ominously tattooed with a shark on it — the hand no longer perpetrates Roland’s
violence. Connor touches Risa gently on the face with that hand. “It holds no fear
for her now, because the shark has been tamed by the soul of a boy. No — the soul
of a man” (322). The cognitive domain “hand” has been mapped onto the domain
“soul” in an ideological statement about the value of all human life. And Connor,
clearly, has participated in the script of adolescent growth.
In another example of the relationship between embodied metaphor, script,
and cultural narrative, once Lev becomes a Clapper, his hands exude metaphorical
ambiguity. His hands are explosive devices but are still able to save friends from
a burning building and tie tourniquets in an emergency. He needs to save these
friends because other Clappers have triggered a conflagration at the harvest camp
by clapping their hands and detonating the explosive fluid their blood now con-
tains. Lev, too, is supposed to continue his acts of terrorism, clapping his hands
and adding to the destruction. But in that moment he stares impotently instead at
his hands: “They look like stigmata, the nail wounds in the hands of Christ” be-
cause he is, after all, this story’s sacrificial lamb, Agnus Dei (310). Always the most
Christian (and Christ-like) character in the novel, Lev has been clothed in white
as a child, until his parents donate him as a “Tithe” to the Unwinding process. In
the moment he rejects his role as terrorist, he looks at his hands, and the text re-
peats in an almost Trinitarian litany: “He holds his hands up before him. He holds
his hands up before him. He holds his hands up before him. And he cannot bring
them together” — because, no matter how angry he is, “a stronger part of him” re-
jects both violence and the “lies” that have led him to acts of terrorism (310, 304).
Ultimately, Lev is imprisoned with his “hands lashed to a crossbeam” so he cannot
clap them; he acknowledges his posture is one of crucifixion (323). But his former
pastor speaks to him about the difference between faith and conviction, and Lev
begins to feel hope again: “All his life there was only one thing Lev was allowed
to believe. It had surrounded him, cocooned him, constricted him with the same
stifling softness as the layers of insulation around him now. For the first time in his
life, Lev feels those bonds around his soul begin to loosen” (329). The metaphors
70 Literary Conceptualizations of Growth

“cocoon” and “constrict” represent the organic metaphors of agency and limita-
tion that demonstrate how human embodiment is both empowering and disem-
powering; he is “cocooned” like a butterfly, but “constricted” in the way that a boa
constrictor might eat its prey. Most important, like Connor, Lev has acknowledged
the script that his actions have consequences — and that he has “put a face on un-
winding” so that the public can no longer pretend that it is an act of benevolence
and charity (327). He has become the iconic embodiment of Unwinding and also
its sacrificial lamb. By fusing these metaphors of dismemberment and Christ-like
embodiment, the text has blended competing cultural narratives of the body as
simultaneously sacrificial and sacred.3
The final section of Unwind is “Part Seven: Consciousness.” It opens with a
quotation from Albert Einstein about how each human “experiences himself, his
thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical
delusion of his consciousness” (315). Einstein identifies this delusion as a “prison”
that can only be overcome if people broaden “our circles of compassion to em-
brace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty” (315). More than
any other metaphor, this mapping of imprisonment onto awareness of embodi-
ment illustrates the text’s ideological investment in teaching readers to value life.
As the novel ends, Connor and Risa join forces to help other Unwinds escape,
while they also work covertly to undermine the system of Unwinding. An adult
who has helped them escape has told them, “people aren’t all good, and people
aren’t all bad. We move in and out of darkness and light all of our lives. Right now,
I’m pleased to be in the light” (111). Connor himself thinks he has become a bet-
ter person once he has internalized Risa’s voice of reason in his own cognition:
“I’m a better person because you’re in my head” (204). He tells the new Unwinds
who arrive at their refuge, “We will think before we act” (333). Shusterman in-
vites adolescents to value their cognitive abilities — but only inasmuch as they are
also embodied abilities. Shusterman depicts the horror of adults dismembering
adolescent bodies as a way to incorporate disobedient bodies into the body poli-
tic.4 This metaphor of dismembering — disassembling, dismantling, dissecting
— demonstrates the lie of the Cartesian split, that legacy of the Enlightenment
which leaves us believing what Einstein calls the “delusion of consciousness.” The

3. For more on the child as sacrificial in Unwind, see Stewart (2013), “A New Holocaust: The
Consumable Youth of Neal Shusterman’s Unwind.”
4. For more on the body politic as it has been historically recognized and repressed, see
Foucault, Discipline and Punish: “One would be concerned with the ‘body politic,’ as a set of
material elements and techniques that serve as weapons, relays, communication routes and sup-
ports for the power and knowledge relations that invest human bodies and subjugate them by
turning them into objects of knowledge” (1995: 28).
 Chapter 3. Blending and cultural narratives 71

adolescent characters in Unwind grow in their respect for their own sentience —
and the reader is left with the hope that the society itself will learn to understand
the problem with any cultural narrative that does not allow each adolescent to
grow to adulthood in an “undivided” state. Nevertheless, Shusterman maps this
valuation of embodiment onto the cultural narrative of valuing life. Thus, the book
is ultimately far more pro-life than pro-choice, even though the text appears ini-
tially to try to present all sides of the debate fairly. The blending of the embodied
metaphors, however, ultimately reveals the specific cultural narrative in which
Unwind is participating.

Primary and complex metaphors, blending, and cultural narratives in

Njunjul the Sun

Lakoff and Johnson distinguish the “primary metaphor” from the “complex meta-
phor.” According to Lakoff and Johnson, “Each primary metaphor has a minimal
structure and arises naturally, automatically, and unconsciously through everyday
experiences by means of conflation, during which cross-domain associations are
formed” (1999: 46). A common primary metaphor is one that I have mentioned
before: the idea that THE BODY IS A CONTAINER. As Lakoff and Johnson explain,
“We are physical beings, bounded and set off from the rest of the world by the
surface of our skins, and we experience the rest of the world as outside us. Each
of us is a container, with a bounding surface and an in-out orientation” (1980: 29).
Meme McDonald and Boori Monty Pryor’s Njunjul the Sun relies frequently on
this primary metaphor; that is, the Australian aboriginal teenager Njunjul experi-
ences his own body as a container when he says things like, “I’m listening up fully,
wanting more” (McDonald & Pryor 2002: 122) or “Every bit of me is aching on the
way home. ’Cept my heart. It’s full as” (136). He also experiences other people’s
bodies as containers, as he demonstrates when he talks, literally, about his uncle
and him filling their bodies with food, even though his uncle is metaphorically full
from working hard: “Uncle and I tuck in…. Uncle reckons he’s really stuffed from
a hard day’s work” (103, italics added). Racist whites are also containers — and
predatory ones at that: “They’ll eat you up. ’Specially you being black” (16).
Repeatedly, Njunjul expresses his emotions in terms of the container schema.
After his bus ride from the reserve to Sydney, he awakens in the morning at his
aunt and uncle’s house, “belly full, brain whizzing, heart bursting” (48, italics add-
ed). The container of his body is both literally full with food and metaphorically
full of emotion. Moreover, he thinks of homesickness as an internalized feeling in
his belly: he equates homesickness with “deadweight feeling in m’belly” (68), and
he thinks of pain as something that enters his body from the outside to the inside:
72 Literary Conceptualizations of Growth

“That pain soaks into you like rain, through your clothes, into your skin” (19).
He also experiences love as something that can be put in and out of a container:
“You gotta put something in before you get something out” (60). Later, after he
has sex with a neighbor, he describes his feelings of satisfaction as if his body is a
container, acknowledging that he has been sated by both sex and lemon meringue
pie. He then shifts the metaphor to his hands, describing being overwhelmed as
having a handful of problems : “what I got has both m’hands full, like fully” (104).
In yet another instance of a body part becoming a container, his uncle describes
deafness as having an ear that is an empty container: “ ‘You don’t listen, we got a
name we call you. Binna-gurri. Binna, this one here,’ Uncle’s pulling his ear, ‘means
ear. Gurri means nothing in there. We call this boy that don’t listen, Binna-gurri,
deaf ’ ” (144, italics added). The ear, the hands, the heart, and the skin are all con-
tainers in Njunjul the Sun — and that notion of the container as “empty” or “full”
is directly linked to cultural narratives about whether or not the racial other is
“empty” or “full” — and therefore worthwhile.
It is important to note that Njunjul himself evaluates his container-body not
only in terms of eating and feeling and hearing but also in terms of expelling waste.
As he rides the bus on his journey to Sydney, he finds himself needing to def-
ecate: “I been busting since the sun went down,” but he cannot use the bus’s toilet
because he can’t help thinking about his excrement, no longer filling his body
but instead filling the waste tank on the bus: “For the rest of the trip your goona
following you, sitting up in that cubicle beside you there, travelling un-deterred,
‘under-turd’!” (25). The bus, instead of his body, would carry his waste — although
he himself almost immediately describes himself as Australia’s waste, thinking of
himself as “Garbage dumped on the edge of town” (27).5 In this formulation of the
container schema, it is better to be the container holding the waste than to be the
waste itself. When he later thinks of himself as empowered, he imagines that he
“can fly overhead and crap on everyone” (64).
On a less scatological level, Njunjul also experiences despair and other emo-
tions as emptiness, as if the container of his body — especially his heart — has
been emptied: “I’m sinking into that feeling. That lost feeling…. I’ve got none of
m’own language. Not just that language from way back, from the old people. But
the language of me now, from the inside” (110–111). Devoid of language, he feels
empty. Later, he adds: “I’m not feeling nothing. I’m thinking I might have died
already, on the inside” (116). Eventually, Njunjul’s primary metaphor — that his
body is a container — shifts to a more complex metaphor: that his body is a con-
tainer that can be divided, cut into pieces and hurt. He describes himself as “a mess

5. For more on abjection as it leads to the “clean and proper social body” in adolescent litera-
ture, see Coats, Looking Glasses and Neverlands (2004: 139).
 Chapter 3. Blending and cultural narratives 73

of broken pieces” (26), and his uncle reinforces the idea, using a metaphor of food
being pulverized for consumption to describe native culture. He says his culture
has been “abused, cut up, sliced and diced every which way” (124). At home in the
north of Australia, the container of Njunjul’s body is shattered by white people;
in Sydney, black people create the fragmentation: “Up home I get busted up by
whitefullas for being black. Down here I get busted up by blackfullas cause they
think I’m trying to be white. I’m wondering what the hell is me” (88). Either way,
he fears he does not know what the inside of the container contains: he does not
know who his internalized self is. “I’m trying to find that warrior in me to stand up
and be counted” (18, italics added).
At the beginning of the novel, Njunjul feels empty because he can no longer
hear the internalized voice of his ancestral spirits, a green tree frog whose voice
guides him. She is internalized within him entirely as if his body is a container
that holds her. As he begins to hear her voice again, he thinks, “my girragundji’s
voice back with me […] unafraid […] talking to me […] telling me things” (34).
She is “that voice inside me” that helps him express an understanding that he has
internalized his culture with his embodiment, a cultural narrative that his aunt re-
inforces (157). Njunjul’s aunt tells him, “There’s good and bad in any place, in any-
one, good and bad in all cultures…. No colour of your skin gonna change what’s in
your heart” (29, italics added). This is the lesson that his aunt and uncle have been
trying to teach him: that he must embrace both the inside and the outside of his
container-as-body. He must accept his internalized culture and the externalized
marker of his race, his skin color. And cultures themselves serve as containers, too,
in Aunty Em’s above-cited metaphor.
Njunjul begins to dance native dances with his uncle at various schools in
Sydney, and the experience helps him learn to respect himself. “Something’s flut-
tering inside me. I’m struggling with the words, tough as shrugging off a cocoon,”
he says, as he asks his uncle to take him with him to dance at a school (130, italics
added). After the dance, Njunjul thinks, “I’m sorting through the treasures I got
in my heart. All the things the kids were asking…. They’ve given me back a part
of myself ” (148). His fragmented container is becoming whole again. Even more
important, he recognizes that his self has been internalized within his body as
container all along: “That fulla Njunjul’s been there for me all along, like fully.
Only me. I’ve not been seeing that. Now I gotta be there for him. I’m feeling that
warrior sun come to me” (159). Two words are repeated throughout Njunjul the
Sun that reinforce this idea of the body as being an empty or full container. First,
Njunjul uses the term “fully” when he means “completely,” as the above quotation
demonstrates. Second, Njunjul refers to people as either “blackfullas” or “whiteful-
las.” The term “fulla” has absolutely nothing to do with fullness; it is simply a slang
version of the word “fellow.” Nonetheless, it still creates a visual repetition of the
74 Literary Conceptualizations of Growth

morpheme “full,” which the reader may or may not cognitively link to fullness,
depending on the reader’s own cultural conceptualizations.
According to Lakoff and Johnson:
Each complex metaphor is in turn built up out of primary metaphors, and each
primary metaphor is embodied in three ways: (1) It is embodied through bodily
experience in the world, which pairs sensorimotor experience with subjective ex-
perience. (2) The source-domain logic arises from the inferential structure of the
sensorimotor system. And (3) it is instantiated neurally in the synaptic weights
associated with neural connections. (1999: 73)

Njunjul describes himself containing emotions because he has experienced his

body as a container. He has conflated physical fullness (or emptiness) with emo-
tional fullness (or emptiness) in a sensorimotor experience that depends on and in-
fluences his subjective experience. He is unconscious of the fact that he has created
this source-domain logic; he makes these comparisons effortlessly. Nonetheless,
his conceptualizations are inseparable from his embodiment.
The primary metaphor THE BODY IS A CONTAINER combines with another pri-
mary metaphor, CHANGE IS MOTION, to create a complex metaphor that Njunjul’s
body is a living container on a journey: THE BODY-AS-CONTAINER JOURNEYS
THROUGH LIFE. Lakoff and Johnson distinguish primary from complex metaphor
as a function of the concept of blending: “Complex metaphors are formed by con-
ceptual blending” (1999: 46). Through the blended creation of complex metaphor,
Njunjul the Sun demonstrates two things: that coming-of-age scripts rely on blend-
ing and that these blends contribute to the perpetuation of cultural narratives.
Njunjul is self-consciously on a physical journey that he understands cogni-
tively to be a metaphorical journey of growth. Earlier in the novel, he describes
himself, “heading straight out of town” (11), but he feels fragmented, “like half of
me got left behind” (13). He acknowledges the metaphorical possibilities of his bus
ride: “We could be going nowhere. Or could be heading into outer space, to the
stars and back. Or locked in a time-capsule buried deep in the earth. Or heading
backwards at full speed. Or just going round and round in our own heads” (17).
His body as container feels “beaten and hopeless before I even get started” (18); he
fears that he is “in no-man’s land” (18). He sees himself as “an alien space traveller.
Maybe that’s what you look like when the main part of you is still way back down
the highway” (25), and he philosophically agrees with his Aunty Milly, who tells
him, “Sometimes you gotta go away from where you wanna be, just so you can get
strong enough to go back there” (41). When he arrives at his aunt and uncle’s, he
narrates that “I can feel I’m starting my journey right here in the kitchen, wiping
dishes with m’uncle” (47), although he can acknowledge that “I’m still travelling,
not arrived nowhere…. Half of me is back there in those broken up pieces” (83).
 Chapter 3. Blending and cultural narratives 75

He feels fragmented because part of his body as container has not traveled with
him: the part of his emotions that feel as if they have remained at home with his
family.
In an almost clichéd moment that relies on the script of sexual initiation to in-
dicate coming of age, he thinks, “There is no way back to that boy I was…. Before
it was a big dark hall, me moving around by touch, bumping into things. Now I’ve
woken up and I’m somewhere I never been before” (97–98). He begins to realize,
however, that he is lost in his girlfriend’s world of self-pity and paternalism, and he
begins to renavigate his journey when his girragundji tells him, “It’s only you can
save you” (128). He decides to take “[t]he next step” (129). A friend acknowledges
the emotional difficulty of Njunjul’s situation, relying on the script of the journey:
“I can see in your eyes you been to some of those dark places I been…. You might
look shy, but inside there you’ve had to fight to stay alive” (135). His uncle does
the same thing, when he takes Njunjul to dance for the first time. The uncle hands
him a traditional outfit to wear: “ ‘That there,’ he’s pointing at the scrap of material
in my hand, ‘that’s your real ticket. That’s what’ll get you on that bus ride, the most
important one. The one that takes you back to yourself ’ ” (138). As Njunjul dances,
he describes how his people sketch butterflies on their thighs because: “[w]hen we
dance we shake our legs like imbala, the butterfly” (139). Njunjul recognizes the
metaphor because he himself has killed a literal butterfly, trying to help it out of its
journey from the cocoon. “He needed that struggle to make him strong enough to
live. I didn’t know that then” (139). Ultimately, his own strength helps him arrive
at the only possible destination: an internal valorization of his own identity. When
he’s dancing, he feels that “[t]hose imbala wings carry me back home” (145).
Njunjul the Sun is hardly original in its reliance on a coming-of-age script that
evokes the Bildungsroman. A rural boy leaves his home to journey to the city, feels
emotionally bereft once there, falls into idleness, has a sexual relationship that is
both exalting and debasing, and redeems himself through work — in this case,
demonstrating native dances at local schools.6 As in any traditional Bildungsroman,
he redeems himself through a work ethic that allows him to embrace his own iden-
tity. In this case, Njunjul seems to demonstrate a disappointing adherence to the
Protestant work ethic and the Anglophone tradition of the Bildungsroman, which
both posit work and self-acceptance as necessary to spiritual healing. Nevertheless,
Njunjul problematizes the scripts of race by interrogating how race is socially con-
structed in terms of embodiment. “My skin don’t fit me no more” (20), Njunjul
thinks, justifying his reasons for leaving the reserve. He has been beaten by police
officers, solely because he was the only blackfulla walking by a school that has been

6. This is a paraphrase of Jerome Buckley’s definition of the standard Anglo-American

Bildungsroman pattern (1974: 18–23).
76 Literary Conceptualizations of Growth

vandalized. Afterwards, “I pissed blood for days. Don’t know which hurt the most.
M’kidneys or m’heart. They both been bleeding” (23). As in the earlier instances
of embodied metaphors of the body as container, Njunjul creates a blend in which
he conceptualizes bleeding in both literal and metaphorical terms.
In Sydney, confronted with an African-American who uses the term “nigger”
freely, Njunjul admires the man’s self-confidence in embodied terms: “He’s turn-
ing that ‘nigger’ word right round and sitting on its head” (55). He also meets
some Maori and admires their body art: “I spent too long with my tattoos on the
inside…. Maybe that’s why I can’t understand that voice inside me no more. I
gotta get it out. Make a sign. Tattoo my frog to the outside, on my shoulder or over
m’heart” (109). When he’s worrying about his cultural identity, he uses an em-
bodied metaphor: “I’m wondering how deep that black goes” (138). And when a
child at one of the schools where he dances asks him, “How long you been black?”,
Njunjul replies, “I reckon I was born black…. but … I reckon it’s taken me a long
while, maybe right up till now, to know that” (147). In Njunjul the Sun, race is both
cultural construction and visceral embodiment; Njunjul must successfully com-
plete his journey in order to recognize that he has internalized his culture into his
body as container in a spectacular blending of embodied metaphors and scripts.
He thinks, “No difference in here, but. In me. Inside of me, I come a long way to
be back where I was…. No Murri-fulla me, no this-fulla me, no that-fulla me […]
Just me. The fulla inside that’s got no shape or size or colour. Just is” (118–119).
Njunjul’s uncle and the adult friends he plays with self-consciously blend bas-
ketball and surviving racism in another complex metaphor that demonstrates the
interplay between conceptualization and cultural narratives. His uncle tells him,
“Basketball is life” (48), and another friend refers to basketball as “[t]his game of
life” (60). Basketball helps Njunjul redefine his sense of identity: “I am whoever I
wanna be, I’m telling m’self. I can be that tall I gotta duck when I walk under that
net. I can be see-through like the wind. I can be the ball, or the endless ocean” (64).
Moreover, his uncle tells him he must repeat traditional stories, learning them
almost like muscle memory, in the same way that basketball players drill the same
routine over and over to learn specific basketball shots (93). The adult basket-
ball players give it to Njunjul “tough, man, because out in the world there you
gonna need to know you can take it tough and still get up and play the game….
They’re watching out for you” (135, italics added). His uncle tells him something
that strikes the book’s most false note: “We’re all equal when it comes to going for
the ball or the finish line. It’s only the best wins, no matter about colour” (136). The
cultural narrative that “the best are all equal” does not really resonate in a book
that demonstrates the pervasiveness of racism this directly.
Njunjul the Sun relies on primary metaphors of the body as container and
complex metaphors of life as a journey and life as a basketball game in blendings
 Chapter 3. Blending and cultural narratives 77

that articulate multiple cultural narratives about race, aboriginal culture, and colo-
nialism. The text critiques the following Euro-Australian cultural narratives about
indigenous peoples: they need protection (10), are thieves (12), and vandals (21).
A white racist Njunjul meets during his bus journey tells the boy, “You bastards
aren’t that easy to get rid of ” (17) and “You can hit, you lot” (17). The racist goes on
to say, “You buggers are hopeless, you know that?…. “Money, booze, jobs […] You
can’t handle any of it. Always goin’ walkabout” (18). Even worse, Njunjul’s (white)
girlfriend claims the same victim status that she assigns to Njunjul: “you and I have
a lot in common…. We’ve got no one to love us. No one wants us, you and me,
do they?” (99). He disagrees internally, thinking of his large and loving extended
family, but she still insists, “We’re both outcasts” (101). Continuing the journey
metaphor, she thinks he’s “walking naked in a world that’s done me wrong” (110),
a feeling that he succumbs to for a time. “Who am I kidding, I can be anything,
anyone, anytime? As if! I’m a blackfulla. I can only be what other people expect me
to be” (64). Eventually, Njunjul rejects both the cultural narratives of white racists
and his girlfriend, but he is nonetheless forced to listen to these views. As his uncle
observes, “For blackfulla’s [sic] the insults start the minute you turn on the TV
or pick up the newspaper or look at a carton of milk” (121). Njunjul understands
that cultural narratives of race are complex. He says of his girlfriend, “I’m feeling
real black and she’s looking real white and that means we live on different planets.
Other times, all that colour stuff don’t matter. We have that same way of thinking
and feeling no matter if we’re black or blue or green” (79).
Part of Njunjul’s sense of fragmentation resides in his ability to perceive that
his culture itself has been shattered. “Now I’m wishing I had my language. Mine
got taken away, but Aunty Milly told me stories of how our old people got pun-
ished for speaking their language. That was in the concentration camps, the re-
serves they hunted us mob into when them migaloos wanted our land. If the old
people did their dances, sung their songs, spoke their language, they were locked
up, heads shaved, punished real bad” (63). And Njunjul’s uncle articulates how
indigenous people experience white colonization in terms of a series of scripts:
“We have to cop your mob telling us mob what we think, feel, care about, want to
have on our toast […] what colour we like our knickers” (122). He concludes with
a cultural narrative shared by indigenous peoples in the book: “Being black is be-
ing political! We don’t have a choice” (122). Later, the uncle tells Njunjul that only
by reclaiming their identity as the Bummah Murri can their people begin to heal.
But he also identifies the need for the people who have wounded them to heal, too:
“For healing, we need whitefullas to hear about our culture. We need whitefullas
to heal first so that we can heal. We gotta keep these stories going if we gonna keep
ourselves alive” (151). White people — not indigenous peoples — are responsible
for racism, so they must be involved in changing the cultural narrative.
78 Literary Conceptualizations of Growth

Conclusion

All cultural narratives rely on conceptual blends, and all cultural narratives that
involve racism rely on embodied metaphors. As cognitive linguistics acknowl-
edges, our embodied perceptions and experiences lead us to create language that,
in turn, reinforces those perceptions and experiences. Although this process is
largely unconscious, the creation of cultural narratives is nonetheless dependent
upon the blending of complex metaphors and scripts. And these metaphors and
scripts create cognitive structures that are powerful because “[a]nything that we
rely on constantly, unconsciously, and automatically is so much part of us that
it cannot be easily resisted, in large measure because it is barely even noticed”
(Lakoff & Turner 1989: 63). The internalization of these cultural narratives all too
often occurs during childhood and adolescence, and so adolescent literature fre-
quently relies on the script of an adolescent acknowledging or even outgrowing
racism as a sign of growth.
As I have shown in previous chapters, growth in adolescent literature is ex-
pressed both through embodied metaphors and through scripts of growth.
Perhaps one way to summarize the common growth script in adolescent litera-
ture is as follows: an adolescent experiences a crisis, learns something about how
to deal with that crisis, and grows as a result. As a general rule, the adolescent
character’s growth involves embodied cognition: the teenager grows psychologi-
cally by relying on such embodied acts of cognition as perception, memory, and
emotion. I am struck, however, by the predominance of the cultural narrative in
adolescent literature that teenagers must grow. Teenagers such as Dallas in The
Outsiders (Hinton, 1967) or Beth in Little Women (Alcott, 1968) or Alice in Go
Ask Alice (Anonymous, 1971) who cannot achieve the maturity it would take to
face adulthood die. And teenagers in formulaic series fiction, of course, frequently
do not grow, for the reasons I have previously cited Nikolajeva as having ana-
lyzed (2002: 65). As I mentioned in Chapter 2, in novels that question the script of
growth, such as Going Bovine or I Am the Cheese, the protagonist’s growth is not
a given. But with these exceptions, growth is such a frequently employed script
in adolescent literature that I submit it has taken on the role of being a cultural
narrative: teenagers are required to grow.7 Indeed, that cultural narrative extends
well beyond the discourse of fiction, for teenaged readers — like teenaged pro-
tagonists — grow, perhaps inevitably, perhaps because of cultural expectations,
perhaps both. Nonetheless, growth as a cultural narrative is a norm of adolescence.

7. For more on the paradox of adolescent literature teaching adolescents to outgrow adoles-
cence, see Trites, Disturbing the Universe (2000: 79–83).
 Chapter 3. Blending and cultural narratives 79

David Herman writes about cultural narratives as scripts that indoctrinate

youth into specific ideologies:
[T]he genre is so designed as to establish and inculcate particular world models
(for example, those associated with delaying gratification or resisting the gratu-
itous fabrication of monsters). This genre’s primary function is not to problema-
tize a world that readers only think they know, but rather to help them acquire
more strategies for getting to know it. Far from presuming the script expertise
supporting more elaborate narrative experiments, children’s fictions consolidate
and reinforce the scripts on which narrative competence itself depends. Such fic-
tions teach reading by teaching scripts. (2002: 111)

While I personally disagree with Herman’s tendency to attribute only a didactic

function to literature for youth, as he does when he implies that the purpose of such
fiction is to teach reading, I agree that cognitive narratology contains a perspective
that is fundamental to the study of (children’s and) adolescent literature, which is
this: cognitive narratology “investigate[s] how narratives, through their forms as
well as their themes, work to privilege some world models over others” (Herman
2002: 113). Adolescent literature privileges what could be called one influential
world model (or, as I prefer to call it, a cultural narrative): the model of requisite
adolescent growth. If we take for granted the patterns of growth in adolescent fic-
tion, and especially if we do not interrogate the embodied metaphors that inform
our understanding of this narrative pattern, we risk overlooking how profoundly
embodied adolescent fiction tends to be and how significantly this embodiment
might shape readers’ cultural narratives about growth, both their own and others’.
 Chapter 4

A case study
Cultural narratives and the “Pixar Maturity Formula”

I would like now to provide a case study of one cultural narrative that involves and
affects cognitive conceptualizations of growth: the cultural narrative that assumes
women are more mature than men. This insidious cultural narrative has an ancient
history that reaches back at least as far as the loyal Penelope in The Odyssey, but
it is promulgated extensively by mass marketed media produced in Hollywood.
This cultural narrative ties into at least three conceptualizations that are salient
to a cognitive study of growth in adolescent literature. First, the cultural narrative
that women are more mature than men is predicated on the false assumption that
women will always-already mature as a result of their ostensibly maternal nature.
That is, since girls will presumably become mothers and care-givers, they are sup-
posed to somehow automatically — almost magically — mature in order to nur-
ture others. Second, if nurturance provides girls with an automatic route to their
maturation, this cultural narrative falsely implies that females really have only one
path to maturity: the predetermined path to parenthood. Third, this cultural nar-
rative insinuates that male growth is more varied and interesting and thus deserves
more attention and praise than female growth.
To be clear, many contemporary authors for young adults avoid this trap
and treat male and female growth with equal parts of sophistication and respect.
But films for the young have lagged behind published narratives — and Pixar
Animation Studios is among the worst of the purveyors of this damaging cultural
narrative.1 The fourteen Pixar feature-length films that are marketed predominant-
ly to preadolescents and adolescents as of this writing thus serve as a case study
of how one cultural narrative — “women are more mature than men” — persists
and in turn contributes to the perpetuation of such additional cultural narratives
as sexism, ageism, and reverse discrimination. In particular, those films that were
written for and marketed more directly to teenagers than children are the most
pertinent to a study on growth in adolescence: they include Up (Docter 2009),

1. For an overview of recent theoretical approaches to children’s films, see Kümmerling-

Meibauer (2013).
82 Literary Conceptualizations of Growth

Toy Story 3 (Unkrich 2010), Brave (Andrews & Chapman 2012), and Monsters
University (Scanlon 2013).
In this chapter, I will explore the Pixar maturity formula as a cognitive script
that enables the cultural narrative that women are more mature than men. This
exploration involves investigating pertinent definitions of maturity in both the
fields of psychology and literary criticism, leading eventually to an interrogation
of Heidegger’s philosophical inquiry into the relationship between maturation and
the knowledge of mortality.2 Such cognitive processes as understanding causal-
ity, Theory of Mind, and separation anxiety also contribute to this investigation.
My goal is to use Pixar as a case study, but the films under investigation raise the
following questions: how do we define maturity? What does maturity look like in
popular culture? Whose maturity do we value? And how does the repetition of a
cultural narrative cognitively reinforce stereotypes?
Because media marketed to children and teenagers in the U.S. is usually pro-
duced by firms invested in earning a profit, media for youth often relies on widely-
accepted cultural narratives, such as sexism, that don’t challenge the status quo.
Pixar movies provide a test case of how one company is, as Zunshine would have
it, “attuned to the intricacies of human cognition” in their ideological “effort to
influence human beings” (2002: 126). Herein, I am concerned with the cultural
narrative I identified in the last chapter: the “world model” of growth. Even more
specifically, I am concerned about cultural narratives that define boys’ growth as
more necessary and/or important than girls’.
Two recent studies document what many of us have known for a long time:
males outnumber females in films marketed to the young by a considerable margin.
Stacy L. Smith and Crystal Allene Cook quantified the 101 top-grossing G-rated
movies from 1990–2005, and determined that only 28% of characters with speak-
ing lines are females (n.d.: 12). Subsequently, Smith and Choueiti determined that
“2.42 males are depicted for every 1 female” in the 122 children’s movies released
from 2006–2009 (n.d.: 1); moreover, the females in these films are far more likely
than males to be depicted in terms of lookism, with slender waists, large chests,
and attractive faces (S.L. Smith n.d.: 1–3).
When I raise this type of concern in public, at least one enthusiastic person
assures me that Pixar is the exception to the rule because every Pixar movie con-
tains at least one strong female character — which is true. My goal in this chapter,
however, is to problematize the cognitive complexity of gender and maturation in
Pixar’s film. When every film contains only one female character who is scripted as

2. It is to be noted that neither the author nor the editors of this series subscribe to or advocate
Heidegger’s reprehensible fascist politics, although the philosophy articulated in his Being and
Time offers some insights into one perspective on maturation.
 Chapter 4. A case study 83

strong — and when that one female character must always make up for the incom-
petence of multiple male characters — a strange script of reverse sexism emerges.
Pixar’s male characters are often depicted as flawed but still lovable, so female
characters carry the burden of saving these men from themselves. Although this
seems at first glance to be a positive side effect of feminism, the script isn’t really
progress. Pixar’s sexism isn’t based solely in the “girls are always helpless” thinking
that informs so many Disney princess movies; instead their sexism emerges from
the complicated interplay between gender stereotypes and social expectations
placed on children as they mature. Thus, in this chapter I analyze the gendered
ways of thinking about maturity that prevent Pixar from producing feminist texts.3

Maturity and causality

Virtually every Pixar movie, even those marketed to younger children, has at least
one mature character who serves as the foil for the protagonist, such as Little Bo
Peep in Toy Story (Lasseter 1995) or Mrs. Incredible in The Incredibles (Bird 2004).
Pixar’s conceptualization of “maturity,” however, bears examination. Mature Pixar
characters are responsible, caring, and able to analyze the relationship between
actions and their consequences. That is, Pixar characters who have undergone
growth to become mature understand cause and effect, although their immature
counterparts may not.
Both psychologists and literary theorists associate maturity with self-actual-
ization and social responsibility. For both groups of scholars, maturity is a function
of cognitive activity. For example, Abraham Maslow (1943) describes maturity in
terms of self-actualization; George Vaillant defines maturity in terms of voluntary
coping mechanisms (seeking social support and conscious cognitive strategies)
and involuntary coping mechanisms, a.k.a. “adaptive defense” or “healthy denial”
(such as “humor, altruism, sublimation, anticipation, and suppression”) (2000: 91).
Laura Berk notes the importance of “resiliency” in emerging adulthood; resiliency

3. Certainly, I’m not the only person to observe Pixar’s sexism. Newspapers and blogs have
commented on the phenomenon for years. Cole Abaius (2009) of Film School Rejects observes:
“Even in the animated animal world, the protagonists are all male. The rats, the clown fish-
es, the cowboy and spaceman toys. The former superheroes, the cars and the ants. There have
been some strong female characters, but they have never been the main focus of the story.” Jen
Chaney (2007) of The Washington Post asks, “Are the Pixar movies an animated Boys Town?”
Linda Holmes (2009) of NPR wrote Pixar a letter asking them to “please” make at least one
movie about “a girl who isn’t a princess.” Michael Hanscom (2006), perhaps Pixar’s most persis-
tent critic, writes that “Pixar is definitely a ‘boy’s club,’ in everything from their choice of subjects
to the characters in the film.”
84 Literary Conceptualizations of Growth

includes problem-solving, coping with stress, and “the capacity to overcome chal-
lenge and adversity” (2010: 354, 466). Similarly, literary theorists typically invoke,
as Jerome Buckley does in defining the Bildungsroman, the mature character’s abil-
ity to work and to love productively as measures of fitting into society as an adult
(1974: 23). Elizabeth Abel, Marianne Hirsch, and Elizabeth Langland note that
for female characters, “inner concentration” and the ability to achieve intimacy
with others are marks of maturity (1983: 8, 11). According to Robin MacKenzie,
“the traditional conception of maturity” depicts “the accent on inner calm and
certainty; the importance of self-acceptance, reconciliation with oneself (seen as
a major moral victory); the supplementary goal of social utility, participation in
community and society” (2007: 352). Especially for female characters, maturity is
depicted as a cognitive self-awareness. Thus, literary theorists and psychologists
alike define social awareness and self-awareness as aspects of cognitive maturity,
although neither psychologists nor literary theorists pay much attention to under-
standing cause and effect as a function of maturity.
Instead, cognitive psychologists theorize that typically-developing children
begin to understand cause and effect by the time they are approximately two years
of age, and they have a firm grasp of cause and effect relationships by the time
they are approximately seven years old (Piaget & Inhelder 1969: 109–113; Berk
1991: 360) . Thus, understanding cause and effect is a function of early childhood,
not later maturation.
Why then does Pixar correlate the cognitive ability to understand cause and
effect with increased maturity? I suspect they do so largely because their imma-
ture characters’ initial inability to prejudge the consequences of their own actions
creates both plot conflict and humor. For example, the car Lightning McQueen
in Cars (Lasseter 2006) is too impatient to change his tires when he clearly needs
to, so he loses the first big race he is in. Similarly, Toy Story’s Woody the Cowboy
thinks that if he can only get rid of the new toy, Buzz Lightyear, the other toys will
respect him again — without recognizing that the community will turn on Woody
if they think he has hurt Buzz. The events caused by these characters’ failure to in-
tuit how other people will act create both conflicts from which the characters grow
and the type of humor that is predicated on a sense of superiority.
Another way to put this would be to note that characters like Woody do
not have an adequately developed Theory of Mind. Nikolajeva argues that “the
knowledge and understanding of other people’s minds are essential social skills”
(2012: 274), and as I mentioned in Chapter 2, Kümmerling-Meibauer defines em-
pathy in terms of “emotional competence” (2011: 130). The ability to predict other
people’s actions and feel empathy for their feelings are thus key skills in emotional
maturity — and they are skills that Pixar routinely depicts males as lacking. Even
the youngest children feel smarter than Lightning McQueen and Woody when
 Chapter 4. A case study 85

they fail to predict how other people will perceive their actions. But the cultural
repetition of the immature character who cannot anticipate causality or other
people’s feelings participates in two disturbing cultural narratives: the myth that
males are inherently insensitive, and the joke that they are funny when they are
stupid.
Pixar’s immature, insensitive, conflict-ridden, funny characters, however, are
easily contrasted to Pixar’s mature characters, who are usually female. The mature
female Pixar character typically serves as a foil to at least one immature male.
I call this “the Pixar maturity formula,” and the script became apparent as early
as Pixar’s first feature-length film Toy Story — which was admittedly, marketed
more to children than adolescents. Nonetheless, virtually all of the toys in Andy’s
bedroom are male and emotionally immature: Woody, Buzz Lightyear, Hamm the
Pig, Mr. Potato Head, Rex the Dinosaur, and Slinky Dog. The only exception is
Bo-Peep, whom the Pixar website describes this way: “she has her hands full being
the voice of reason for her cowboy, Sheriff Woody, and the rest of the gang” (Pixar
n.d.). In other words, Pixar itself identifies Bo-Peep as “the voice of reason” — and
she clearly has her hands full because she is the only reasonably mature character
in the movie. Aside from Bo-Peep, the only other female characters are Andy’s
mother, whose face is never shown, the annoying little sister of the evil boy next
door, and Andy’s baby sister, whom the toys call “Princess Drool.” The standard
Pixar maturity formula thus follows this script: a mature female, who is coded as
an adult, accepts responsibility for herself and for others. Even in the beginning of
the movie, she can intuit how other people will react by anticipating their feelings
and the relationship between cause and effect, and, as I will demonstrate in my
analysis of two Pixar films marketed directly to adolescents, Up and Toy Story 3,
she has a higher cognitive facility than the male characters around her do because
she can accept death and control her sexuality.

The Pixar maturity formula

The major protagonists of thirteen Pixar films are male — with the exception of
Jessie in Toy Story 2 (Lasseter 1999) and Toy Story 3. But on the credits, Jessie re-
ceives third billing in both Toy Story 2 and Toy Story 3, reinforcing cultural narra-
tives that males matter more than females. I reserve a special place for Pixar’s one
exception to this rule, Brave, in my conclusion. Moreover, all of the male Pixar pro-
tagonists grow because they need to grow: Nemo grows in Finding Nemo (Stanton
2003); Mr. Incredible grows; Buzz and Woody grow. Pixar clearly assumes that
children are interested in — and perhaps even inspired by — stories about other
people’s growth, reinforcing my belief that growth is a pervasive cognitive script.
86 Literary Conceptualizations of Growth

Disney has a long tradition of appealing to a dual audience.4 In Disney’s major

releases, the story frequently includes adults who need to grow as much as ado-
lescents do in a clear bid to pull parents into theatres along with their children.
Mr. Banks established the model for adult maturation in Mary Poppins (Stevenson
1964), which was Disney’s first commercially successful use of the adult-growth
pattern. Indeed, Mr. Banks grows more than both his children put together.
Following this fifty-year-old script of including adult male growth as a subplot of
children’s movies, Pixar makes their films and markets them to a dual audience of
both children and adults, which may explain why the protagonists in Disney and
Pixar movies are so often adults.
This may also be why, even though some Pixar protagonists are coded to look
like adults, they don’t act like adults. The main characters in all three Toy Story
films, Cars and Cars 2 (Lasseter 2011), Ratatouille (Bird 2007) WALL·E (Stanton
2008), and Monsters University are physically coded as being older than children,
although they either are or act like young men. (Indeed, Monsters University is so
attenuated to the ways that young men bond and so sexist in the ways that it fol-
lows the hackneyed script of the bromance that it deserves no further attention
than this one sentence.)5 More interestingly, in WALL·E’s case the robot is at least
700 years old, indicating that he’s far from being the age of a child. The protago-
nists of The Incredibles, Monsters, Inc. (Docter 2001), and Up are actually adult
men. Carl in Up, for example, is even labeled “elderly” by his young side-kick,
Russell.6
The Pixar maturity formula is a script that appears in most of these films. For
example, Mrs. Incredible is both the most mature character and the only charac-
ter in another Pixar movie marketed to adolescents, The Incredibles, who seems
capable of understanding the relationship between cause and effect. She may well
be the most mature of all Pixar characters. Her husband, Mr. Incredible, rushes
off in a scripted mid-life-crisis-induced urge to save the world without thinking
through the negative consequences of his actions. His children, of course, ignore
their mother’s injunction to keep themselves safe and also rush off to save their

4. Barbara Wall refers to texts that address both a child and an adult audience as “dual address”
(1991: 36) to a “dual audience” (1991: 22).
5. A “bromance” is a homosocial and/or homoerotic story about male bonding between two
male friends. These buddies, who are close enough emotionally to be, effectively, brothers fol-
low a script that parallels the heterosexist script for a romance — hence the term “bromance.”
Original coinage attributed to Chris Cote in 1999 (TransWorld Surf). See also (“bromance,” n.
2013).
6. Ian Wojcik-Andrews writes about “Kid Quests,” his term for children’s movies that pair chil-
dren and adults who share quests (2013: 61–74).
 Chapter 4. A case study 87

parents — leading to more unintended consequences. The antagonist, Syndrome,

shares the same male inability to perceive the relationship between cause and
effect.
The other two adult females in The Incredibles are Mirage, something of a
femme fatale who needs to grow before she can see the error of her ways, and Edna
Mode, the temperamental, histrionic, and irascible fashion designer whose voice
is that of a man — specifically, Brad Bird, author and director of The Incredibles.
She is utterly fabulous — and ultimately little more than a caricature of Hollywood
costume designer Edith Head. Moreover, Edna’s desexualization is supposed to be
part of what makes her funny, but she enacts a cultural narrative with damaging
implications for cross-gendered and trans-gendered people.
Ratatouille is another Pixar film marketed to children, adolescents, and adults.
The protagonist is a young adult male, and the film is set in a male-dominated en-
vironment — the kitchen of a haute cuisine restaurant in Paris — so all of the main
and supporting characters except one are male. The kitchen’s rôtisseur, Collette, is
Pixar’s first obvious attempt at creating a feminist character. She is active; she is
strong; she is competitive; she is generous; she is, indeed, a well-rounded character
who appears to be defying stereotypical scripts. She says things like:
haute cuisine is an antiquated hierarchy built upon rules written by stupid old
men, rules designed to make it impossible for women to enter this world…. I am
the toughest cook in this kitchen. I worked too hard for too long to get here and
I am not going to jeopardize it for some stupid garbage boy who got lucky. (Bird
2007)

But Collette is also the only significant female character in the movie — so of
course, she is also the only mature character. (Oddly enough, although the movie
has hundreds of rats, all of them are male. How are these rats procreating so pro-
lifically if every single one of them is a male?) In any event, Collette bears the
responsibility for representing all women and all mature adults. The burden is so
great for one animated character to bear that she never fully gains traction as a
completely likeable character, which plays into cultural narratives that “strong
women are strident and often unlikable.”
A few characters complicate concepts of maturity in Pixar films, but they do
so in problematic ways. The Prospector in Toy Story 2 initially appears to be that
film’s mature character — but he proves to be the bad guy. In Finding Nemo, be-
cause the mother is eaten by a barracuda relatively early in the movie, the closest
thing to a helpful or mature adult is a turtle, Crush, who talks like an adolescent,
but proves to be wise because he is 150 years old. He’s generous and a good role-
model, but Pixar nonetheless still depicts him as an adolescent male, implying that
it is impossible for males to be truly mature, especially if they like to have fun.
88 Literary Conceptualizations of Growth

As I have already mentioned, WALL·E is even older than Crush, although the
robot is as gendered as the turtle. Robots can’t procreate, so why do they need to
be gendered in the first place? WALL·E’s love interest, Eve, is nothing but a flying
robotic uterus. (She is designed to open herself up and store life forms inside her
body so as to nurture them in a conceptual blend that merges technology and bi-
ology.) The closest thing the film WALL·E has to a grown-up is Captain McCrae,
whose ship has been orbiting the earth for centuries while all the humans grow
increasingly fat and lazy from living in centuries of microgravity. Like all males
in Pixar movies, however, McCrae needs to grow into his maturity. He is initially
as inept as everyone else aboard the starship Axiom and only later grows into a
semblance of the maturity that real leadership requires.
Mature characters in Pixar films, then, are usually scripted as female and as
adults. The scripting depends greatly on cognitive functioning, such as under-
standing causality and empathy — which females are scripted to do almost auto-
matically and males are scripted as needing to learn. The Pixar maturity formula
emerges from cognitively gendered conceptualizations and contributes directly to
widespread cultural narratives about female maturity and male immaturity.

Up and Being-towards-death

More than any Pixar movie, Up problematizes not only maturation but also matu-
rity. The plot is shaped entirely by a competition between two elderly men hoping
to achieve something significant that will help them deal with their individual
fear of their mortality. Despite his highly problematic politics, Heidegger’s work in
Being and Time has some pertinence to the study of growth and maturation — es-
pecially in the context of men approaching their deaths. According to Heidegger,
we are all always dying, which involves understanding ourselves as Being-in-time;
in other words, we live constantly aware of death as the opposite of life: “The ‘end’
of Being-in-the-world is death” (2008: H234).7 That said, in Heideggerian terms,
the ability to mature is inherent in life, and human maturity depends on a cogni-
tive awareness of temporality and sentience (one’s own and others’), of care and
concern, and of the limitations of being, as being is constrained by death. All
maturation then is implicated in Being-towards-death, according to Heideggerian
philosophy.

7. According to Heidegger, “This end, which belongs to the potentiality-for-Being — that is to

say, to existence — limits and determines in every case whatever totality is possible for Dasein”
(2008: H234).
 Chapter 4. A case study 89

But people who fear death, living in constant anxiety about it, lack the ma-
turity that comes from understanding Being-in-Time: “[a]nxiety in the face of
death must not be confused with fear in the face of one’s demise” (Heidegger 2008:
H251). Being-towards-death is not the same thing as fearing death, which Carl
and Charles Muntz clearly do in Up. They fear death so thoroughly that they go to
great lengths to compensate for their fears. The only human mature enough to face
death with acceptance in Up is, of course, an adult woman. Carl’s wife, Ellie, exem-
plifies Being-towards-death in conceptualized maturity; the two men demonstrate
their fear, denial, and resultant immaturity.
The movie opens when Ellie and Carl are children who yearn to have an ad-
venture like their hero, Charles Muntz, who assures them, “Adventure is out there!”
(Docter 2009). Although Ellie can talk while she is a little girl, in the montage of
scripts that follows depicting their adult life — their marriage, Carl working as a
balloon vendor, their shared disappointment in not having children, their love de-
spite life’s disappointments — Ellie has no voice. Ten minutes and 47 seconds into
the movie, Ellie is dead, and no other female character speaks in the entire movie,
except a female cop whose lines last about eleven seconds. Ellie has spoken for a
total of 3 minutes and 50 seconds. During the almost four minutes she has a voice;
Carl doesn’t. He says only “well,” and “wow,” with one “gasp” in between (Docter
2009). As a child, then, Ellie is already more mature and articulate than Carl, so
she must be silenced and effaced in the main plot of the movie so that he may grow
to her level of maturity.
After Ellie dies, Carl still loves the house he has shared with Ellie so much that
he inflates a mass of balloons and floats his house away from the construction sur-
rounding him and the threat of being moved to a nursing home. Metaphorically,
the floating house is the container that protects Carl’s body and serves to keep
Ellie’s protective spirit close to him. But Explorer Scout Russell has intrusively
stowed away in the escaping house because he wants to earn his “Assisting the
Elderly” badge. Carl doesn’t want the boy’s assistance; he wants to fulfill his child-
hood promise to Ellie to go to Paradise Falls, South America. Coincidentally
enough, without any navigational tools or maps, the house lands right across the
plateau from Paradise Falls.
Near Paradise Falls, Russell discovers a marvelous bird, whom he assumes, of
course, is a male. Carl assumes the bird is male, too. The audience assumes the bird
is male. Everyone always assumes Disney animals are male, unless they are specifi-
cally told otherwise. Russell names the bird “Kevin,” and even when they discover
she is a mother, they keep calling her by the patriarchal and colonialist name the
two males have imposed on her.
And then the competition between males begins in a fairly predictable script.
It would seem that Charles Muntz has been seeking that exact same bird — Kevin
90 Literary Conceptualizations of Growth

— for decades, to prove to the scientific society that stripped him of his reputa-
tion that this large bird is not mythical. In the many decades he has spent living
in South America, Muntz hasn’t caught a single bird, although he has managed to
create a servant class for himself out of dogs by inventing collars that allow them
to talk. Those collars aren’t anywhere near as miraculous as the fact that the movie
has as many dogs as Ratatouille has rats — and not one of those dogs is female.
Again, I ask, how are they procreating? How can a whole species be born and ma-
ture and procreate without females? Another obvious cultural narrative is being
reinforced here: males matter more than females.
In any event, both of the old men in Up are chasing their fear of death. Muntz
wants to return with the bird so he can return to glory before he dies; Carl wants to
have an adventure before he dies. Carl is granted his wish largely because (to give
him credit), he does grow. He learns to help others and accept help from them.
Before he meets Russell and Kevin, he has only ever interacted with or depended
on Ellie. Carl is rewarded because he grows; Muntz is defeated because he cannot.
But because they are men, not women, the plot is predicated on the cultural nar-
rative of their need to grow.
In the final scene, Carl fills in as Russell’s father at his Scouting award cer-
emony — and Russell’s mother, like every other female in the last 77 minutes of
the movie, does not speak. As it happens, plots about male growth account for
approximately 85% of the movie’s length. Male growth is clearly more interesting
than female growth in Pixar’s Up.

Toy Story 3, separation anxiety, and control

If Up preys on people’s fear of death, Toy Story 3 preys on a variety of different

types of separation anxiety. Toy Story 3 relies on blended cultural narratives to
achieve the effect of depicting the separation necessary to maturation in terms
of separation anxiety: the audience must understand the back story of the previ-
ous Toy Story movies, and they must understand the cultural narrative in which
American parents have trouble letting their children mature and become inde-
pendent. Indeed, Pixar marketed the movie to the young adults, now heading to
college themselves, who had grown up watching Toy Story fifteen years earlier. It is
thus among the most adolescent of Pixar’s films.
Woody and the gang fear separation from their father-figure, Andy, because
he is now old enough to head to college — like many of the young adults who had
watched Toy Story as three-year-olds and Toy Story 3 as eighteen-year-olds. Andy’s
mother also expresses her separation anxiety in both the opening and closing
scenes of the movie, reflecting the growing trend of hovering “helicopter parents”
 Chapter 4. A case study 91

who have even more anxiety about being separated from their kids than the kids
have about being separated from their parents. Moreover, when Andy decides to
take Woody to college but leave his other toys behind, Woody faces another type of
separation anxiety: fear of being removed from his community of friends. One of
those friends, Jessie the Cowgirl, already has a long-established separation anxiety
because the little girl who used to own her abandoned her years ago. When Andy’s
toys get donated to a childcare center, they meet a strawberry-scented teddy bear,
Lots-o’-Huggin’ Bear, who tyrannically rules the daycare center because he was so
scarred when his owner abandoned him. Eventually, the toys escape the daycare
center (and the city dump) and return to Andy, who gives them to a young friend,
Bonnie, whom he trusts will play nicely with his toys. The final scene in which
Andy and Bonnie play together with the toys is supposed to mark two rites of
passage: the toys’ transition to a new owner and Andy’s transition into adulthood.
Children — and adults — are meant to be reassured that transitions are normal
and maturation will turn out all right, despite everyone’s normal separation anxi-
eties.
But who really needs to hear those cultural narratives the most? Young adults
headed to college? Parents sending their children to college? Baby Boomers and
Gen X-ers grieving transitions in their world caused by global warming and
weather disasters, terrorism, deep recession, and demographic shifts? The movie
is as YA as any movie Pixar has released except Monsters University. But in Toy
Story 3, viewers receive a burden linked to maturation, one that implies that as
part of their maturity, they will be responsible for the elderly, the broken, and the
disposable — even though those previous generations failed to care for themselves
or their world.
Several subplots of this film combine to create a guilt-laden cultural narra-
tive: that the young are responsible for ensuring a safe future for their elders. This
involves the gendered nurturing implicated in the Pixar maturity formula. Of the
thirty toys who are characters in Toy Story 3, twenty-three are male or coded male,
including the male big baby-doll. And although Woody and Buzz have grown
more mature, women characters are this movie’s most efficient problem-solvers.
Andy’s mother still has no name, and she is anxious about his leaving, but she is
a mature adult — and the movie includes no other adult male human who has
speaking lines. As for the female toys: Jessie and Mrs. Potato Head are as anx-
ious as ever, and Bo-Peep is gone. Her role as the “voice of reason” proves to have
been made obsolete by Barbie’s increased maturity. Woody also meets a toy named
Dolly, however, who immediately solves whatever problem is set before her. She
is one of Bonnie’s toys, and she is the only functionally mature character of that
group of toys. Although Barbie weeps hysterically in the first part of the movie,
only too grateful to be rescued by a Ken doll at the daycare center, she grows very
92 Literary Conceptualizations of Growth

quickly. She moves with Ken into his Dream House (which is, technically, a Barbie
Dream House), and tries to do his bidding — but alas, she is forced by the Pixar
maturity formula into a level of maturity that Ken will never achieve. Barbie helps
thwart the tyranny of the dictator Lots-o’-Huggin’ Bear, and in her moment of glo-
ry, she paraphrases the Declaration of Independence, insisting, “Authority should
derive from the consent of the governed, not from the threat of force!” (Unkrich
2010). Here is true maturity: she is a female standing up to an abusive male, spout-
ing rhetoric with which both American liberals and conservatives can agree.
Interestingly enough, Barbie is embodied in very sexual ways. That is, Toy
Story 3 represents Pixar’s first foray into a genuine exploration of sexuality as a
component of maturation. Certainly, Mr. and Mrs. Incredible kiss, as do Collette
and Linguini in Ratatouille. Mirage is flirtatious in The Incredibles; so are Cars’
Sally the Porsche and Toy Story 2’s Bo-Peep and Jessie. But none of those charac-
ters are as sexualized as a Barbie doll — and Pixar always ensures that these flirta-
tious female characters are unthreatening and effectively chaste. If Mrs. Incredible
is having sex, well, that’s OK; she is married after all. But most characters in the
Pixar maturity formula are desexualized or flirtatious virgins. Barbie, then, would
seem to be a potential anomaly, but Pixar handles Barbie’s inherent promiscuity
deftly by transforming Ken into a eunuch (which Ken dolls are, after all). He is
obsessed with clothing and therefore unthreatening because his highest priority
is his wardrobe. He is, at best, desexualized and immature, or — at worst — a
mean-spirited example of homophobia as a cultural narrative. This, then, is the
final piece of the Pixar maturity formula: females are mature when they can ac-
cept and control their sexuality. Buzz Lightyear can barely control his sexual en-
ergy when he is set in his Spanish-speaking mode — surely one of the most racist
stereotypes yet to escape from the Pixar studio. But he is at his most immature
when he can’t control his libido; Jessie is no better when she eggs the behavior on.
The mature body recognizes the power of sexuality and controls itself — and only
women are capable of this type of sexual self-control in Pixar movies. Not all fe-
males do control themselves sexually, as Jessie demonstrates, but she is not coded
as a full-grown adult woman, either. She is, after all, a “cowgirl.” Ancient scripts
about females being responsible for controlling human sexuality are reinforced
throughout these films in a 1950s “it’s the girl’s job to say no” sort of cultural nar-
rative. This, of course, also ties into ancient cultural narratives that link maturity
to reproduction and maternity.
Barbie’s self-control and maturity in the face of tyranny demonstrate the
second layer of adult ideology that Toy Story 3 imposes on youth. Fears about
consumption and planned obsolescence seep between the cracks of this sterile,
middle-class environment. Moreover, although a few children in the daycare
center are people of color, most are white. Andy and his family, Bonnie and her
 Chapter 4. A case study 93

family, and the family that abandoned Lots-o’ are all white. They all live in single-
family homes, untouched by recession. Poverty doesn’t exist, and the only contact
the film has with working class humans involves the guys who drive the garbage
trucks in town. All of this middle-classedness leads to a great deal of disposable
income, and the toys become the metaphor for this disposability. As they are sent
to the dump, each scene grows more intense. The dump is the blatant metaphor for
a level of conspicuous consumption that is meant to be unconscionable in a reces-
sion economy. The viewer is inundated first with piles and then with mountains of
waste that humans have generated — with a clear message that young people will
have to clean this mess up someday, even though they are responsible for neither
the mess nor the recession that makes all this waste so obviously wrong. Raising
the stakes on the psycho-drama of waste, Pixar works Being-towards-death into
their environmental scare tactic. As Buzz, Jessie, Woody and their six friends slide
slowly into the raging fire of a trash incinerator, they gaze with sad acceptance at
one another, clasp hands, and grimly face death together. This is Buzz Lightyear’s
moment of greatest maturity, for it is he who calmly communicates to Jessie — and
she then to all the other toys but Woody — the certainty of their death as individu-
als and as a community.
They are saved, of course, by a deus ex machina. Literally, the “little green men”
space alien toys operate a mechanical junkyard claw and pull the toys out of the
jaws of hell. Thus, Pixar gets to have it both ways: the characters acknowledge their
Being-towards-death (in ways far healthier than Up does), but the toys still don’t
need to die in order to accomplish this script of maturation.
They can’t die, of course, because this is a G-rated movie and such movies do
not allow for a holocaust of nine beloved characters. Even more important, how-
ever, these toys insist that they must live in order to take care of Andy. “We are
his toys,” Woody says as an invocation of their sacred responsibility to take care of
their parent-figure, Andy (Unkrich 2010). People, like toys, will inevitably grow
older and broken. Children who do not take care of their toys, like toys who do
not take care of their owners, are meant to feel guilty for their negligence. Of all the
separation anxieties that saturate this film, the fear of the child no longer taking
care of the elderly is the most pervasive. Toy Story 3 saddles the young with re-
sponsibility for the aging population as effectively as Up does. Part of maturation is
and should be accepting care for the elderly — but when the older generation has
been as profligate as the generation that has generated as much trash as Toy Story 3
depicts, something in the equation seems flawed. Why should young people have
to assume responsibility for a generation that has shirked theirs?
In sum: according to Toy Story 3, adolescents are responsible for the envi-
ronment, for standing up to unjust tyranny, and for calming their elders’ fears
of becoming obsolete. These cultural narratives about responsibility, however, are
94 Literary Conceptualizations of Growth

mixed because, at the end of the day, only women are truly mature in this film.
Various male characters grow into maturity, and Woody even achieves maturity by
the very end of Toy Story 3, but these male characters either achieve their maturity
late or do not sustain it for long. Thus, Toy Story 3 and Up both hold adolescents
responsible for adults’ future, despite teenagers’ lack of economic, political, or so-
cial power. Only adult women in Pixar films can sustain maturity, which they do in
largely cognitive terms: by accepting social- and self-responsibility, by anticipating
the relationship between cause and effect, by resiliency in the face of problem-
solving, and most important, by accepting death and controlling their sexuality.
That is, their embodiment as sexualized-but-dying organisms is fully integrated
with their cognition. In giving women so much responsibility for being self-aware
while they save men from themselves, the Pixar maturity formula absolves males
of sustained maturity.

Conclusion

With the film Brave, Pixar demonstrates that the studio is aware of the inherent
sexism in the Pixar maturity formula. Although all the males in Brave are grossly
immature, for the first time, the film depicts two flawed female characters who
both need to grow: a mother and her adolescent daughter, Merida. Merida rejects
the scripted narrative of the marriage plot, although she falls prey to another script
that is overused in Hollywood: the teenaged daughter’s Freudian conflict with her
mother.8 Merida wishes her mother would change, and change the mother does:
into a bear. Queen Elinor thus serves as a blended conceptual metaphor who, quite
literally, enacts the script of the “Mama Grizzly.” Indeed, that metaphor is so literal
here as to be a laughable cliché — but at least, for the first time, Pixar has created
a film that manages to avoid the Pixar maturity formula. Unsurprisingly, the film
was not an immediate financial success in grossing only $66.7 million in its first
weekend, as compared to Toy Story 3’s $110.3 million first weekend take and Up’s
$72 million, adjusted for inflation (Dennis 2012). Merida’s maturation, however,
revolves solely around two axis: her mother and marriage. While the adolescent
protagonist wins the right to decide who she will marry, or even if she will marry,
the plot rests on a blend of the marriage plot and the mother/daughter plot.9 In
other words, although immature males in Pixar movies face a variety of different

8. For more on mother/daughter conflicts in literature for youth, see Trites, Waking Sleeping
Beauty (1997: 100–121).
9. Although the term “marriage plot” is a conventional term in Anglophone literary criticism,
see Marianne Hirsch, The Mother/Daughter Plot, for more on both the marriage plot and the
 Chapter 4. A case study 95

types of conflict, the one girl who needs to mature faces the only two standard
crises that have faced adolescent girls since Persephone had to decide between
Demeter and Hades. Is it any wonder that adolescents raised on a steady diet of
Pixar’s cultural narratives might well conclude that boys’ growth is, indeed, more
interesting than girls’?
Ultimately, my concern about the Pixar maturity formula stems from the cul-
tural narrative, the world message, being conveyed to adolescents. Young people
— especially adolescent girls — are given the message that their growth is not very
interesting, but it is nonetheless their job to improve the world. This formula also
implies a cultural narrative that it is normal for adult males to be immature and
that it is abnormal for adult women to have the same daily incompetencies, fears
of death, and libidinal drives that men have. That combination creates gendered
cultural narratives about maturity that are unbalanced and unsustainable. For ex-
ample, not only do these movies imply that only women can be truly competent
adults, but they also imply that the drive for competence can lead those women to
over-functioning perfectionism, as is the case with Colette, with Andy’s mother,
and with Queen Elinor. The films also imply that males are rarely capable of over-
coming their narcissism long enough to mature significantly, as is the case with
Buzz Lightyear. And Up implies that only women are self-actualized enough to
accept death. Moreover, these cultural narratives are as insulting to men as they
are to women.
Early feminism called for females to be depicted as something more than just
passive, house-bound girls. Pixar has clearly responded with smart, strong women
like Mrs. Incredible, Collette in Ratatouille, and Barbie in Toy Story 3. But the re-
sponse has been a limited one. It’s as if Pixar believes that in depicting one strong
woman per film, the studio has fulfilled all moral obligations to portray other fe-
males in a ratio that equals the depiction of male characters. Simply focusing on
one mature female, however, is still tokenism, even if that character is the strongest
character in the film. Even worse, if that one woman is invariably the only mature
character, audiences experience cultural affirmation of male immaturity, replicat-
ing the cultural narrative that women are more mature than men. The repetition
of information creates stereotypical knowledge — here, as a maturity formula that
privileges only male growth — and reinforces stereotyped scripts.
What then are the cognitive effects on adolescents and preadolescents? How
do these films affect the self-perceptions of young adults? And how do they af-
fect the way that girls and boys think differently about maturation? Given the fre-
quency with which the cultural narrative “women are more mature than men”

mother/daughter plot (1989: 10–11). For more on the myth of Persephone influencing narrative
structure in children’s literature, see Blackford (2012: 1–20).
96 Literary Conceptualizations of Growth

is repeated, it seems possible that viewers of both genders might well internalize
gendered and self-fulfilling conceptualizations of maturation from the sheer vol-
ume of repetition.
Feminists — like Marxists, post-colonialists, race theorists, Queer theorists,
and all scholars of alterity and otherness — have identified damaging cultural nar-
ratives and their ideological implications for decades. Cultural narratives enscript
cognitive conceptualizations, entailing them in ways that prevent people from
considering alternative cultural narratives. How many times, for example, does
an adolescent need to watch films in which females are the only mature characters
before s/he concludes that women in all walks of life are, indeed, more mature
than men? The enscripting process of the cultural narrative thus limits conceptual-
ization, usually because enscripting works unconsciously. Cognitive psychologists
believe stereotyping to be a categorization that is “automatically activated upon
perception of a category member” (Lepore & Brown 1997: 275), and they believe
the process is a largely subconscious one (Oliner 2000).10 However, one example of
a shifting cultural narrative demonstrates that it is possible to alter the entailments
of cultural narratives: changing attitudes toward gay marriage in the U.S. in the last
decade exemplify how cultural narratives can be re-enscripted. That said, cultural
narratives about gender and race (and most forms of otherness) are enscripted so
frequently and so early in the lives of children and adolescents, through books,
films, television, the media, parenting, schools, and religion, that sexism and rac-
ism are deeply embedded in the cognition of many, many people.
Male immaturity has been a source of comedy from ancient times to Homer
Simpson. Pixar is not alone in relying on scripts of male incompetence for hu-
mor. They are, however, deluding themselves if they believe their efforts to date
are feminist. Instead, they are perpetuating sexist norms as pervasive cognitive
categorizations that emerge from embodiment and reside in both conscious and
unconscious conceptualizations of growth to reinforce ancient stereotypes.

10. For more on cognition and stereotyping, see Bodenhausen and Macrae (1998) and Macrae,
Bodenhausen, and Milne (1995). In addition, although Lawrence Hirschfeld (1996) employs
questionable research methods in his experimental design, he does outline the cognitive dimen-
sions of racism as an effect of human categorization in Race in the Making: Cognition, Culture,
and the Child’s Construction of Human Kinds.
 Chapter 5

Epistemology, ontology, and

the philosophy of experientialism

As well as exploring such cognitive issues as embodied metaphors, scripts, and

cultural narratives, theorists informed by cognitive linguistics are concerned with
epistemology, ontology, and consciousness in the effort to understand not only
how the brain works, but also to engage philosophically with how we know and
what we do with knowledge. Lakoff and Johnson refer to their philosophy as “ex-
perientialism,” arguing that “[o]ur experience of the world is not separate from
our conceptualization of the world. Indeed, … the same hidden mechanisms that
characterize our conscious system of concepts also play a central role in creat-
ing our experience…. [T]here is an extensive and important overlap between
those mechanisms that shape our concepts and those that shape our experience”
(1999: 509). In other words, the ways that we experience, categorize, and concep-
tualize ideas, such as growth, are inseparable from our philosophical understand-
ings of those concepts.
Lakoff and Johnson first articulate their theory of experientialist philosophy
in Metaphors We Live By:
We reject the objectivist view that there is absolute and unconditional truth with-
out adopting the subjectivist alternative of truth as obtainable only through the
imagination, unconstrained by external circumstances…. An experientialist ap-
proach … allows us to bridge the gap between the objectivist and subjectivist
myths about impartiality and the possibility of being fair and objective…. This
does not mean that there are no truths; it means only that truth is relative to our
conceptual system, which is grounded in, and constantly tested by, our experi-
ences and those of other members of our culture in our daily interactions with
other people and with our physical and cultural environments. (1980: 192–193)

Lakoff and Johnson reject all notions of the Cartesian split between body and
mind because — as they put it — “the mind is inherently embodied, reason is
shaped by the body” (1999: 5). They argue that philosophical questions emerge
from three things: “a reason shaped by the body, a cognitive unconscious to which
we have no direct access, and metaphorical thought of which we are largely un-
aware” (1999: 7). These three components of cognitive linguistics — embodied
reason, an inaccessible unconscious that shapes that reason, and metaphorical
98 Literary Conceptualizations of Growth

thinking, which is also implicated in our conscious and unconscious reasoning —

help me analyze growth in terms of such fundamental philosophical concepts in
adolescent literature as ontology and epistemology. The novels in David Almond’s
Skellig sequence, Skellig (1998) and My Name is Mina (2010), as well as Walter
Mosley’s 47 (2005) and Sherman Alexie’s Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time
Indian (2007), demonstrate the relationship between maturation and experien-
tialist philosophy in adolescent literature. Philosophy, as inflected by cognitive
linguistics, provides one avenue for exploring how literary characters experience
growth both ontologically, in terms of their being, and epistemologically, in terms
of how they know.
For example, in David Almond’s My Name is Mina, Mina philosophically asks
a conceptual question, “Is there a God? Was there ever emptiness?” (2010: 16). My
Name is Mina is the prequel to Almond’s Skellig, in which Mina tells her friend
Michael, “Sometimes we have to accept that there are things we can’t know….
Sometimes we think we should be able to know everything. But we can’t. We have
to allow ourselves to see what there is to see, and we have to imagine” (1999: 140).
Mina and Michael fundamentally question what it means to be and what it means
to know. They also worry whether they should help someone who might be home-
less when their parents don’t even know what they are up to, a situation that cre-
ates a recurring ethical tension throughout Skellig about what these children value
and how much responsibility they bear for others. Their growth, then, involves a
considerable amount of philosophical conceptualization.
Skellig and My Name is Mina demonstrate how significant both embodied
reason and the relationship between the cognitive unconscious and metaphorical
thought are to adolescent literature. Walter Mosely’s 47 and Sherman Alexie’s The
Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, on the other hand, problematize the
relationships between epistemology, ontology, and categorization — in this case,
specifically the construction of race as a cognitive concept. This chapter will thus
proceed in two sections: in the first section I will analyze embodied cognition in
Skellig and My Name is Mina; that is, I will examine how the protagonists’ matura-
tion engages what Lakoff and Johnson would describe as “reason shaped by the
body,” eventually demonstrating how Almond employs metaphorical thought to
interrogate complex philosophical questions about being, knowing, and values.
In the second section, I will discuss racial construction as an epistemological and
ontological issue integrally connected with maturation, concluding with a com-
mentary on the relationship between cognitive linguistics and philosophy in the
context of adolescent literature.
 Chapter 5. Epistemology, ontology, and the philosophy of experientialism 99

Embodied reason in David Almond’s novels

At the beginning of Almond’s novel Skellig, Michael finds in the garage of his new
home a man he initially assumes is homeless but who proves to be a creature that
may perhaps be an angel, or a new phase in evolutionary history, or something
else altogether. Michael nonetheless understands the creature, Skellig, and his on-
tological status entirely in terms of embodiment, as does the only friend to whom
the boy shows Skellig, Mina (the girl next door). Michael establishes a set of epis-
temological questions when he relies on his perceptions to question how he has
gained knowledge about Skellig; that is, the text makes clear that he knows what
he knows by emphasizing how he gains knowledge through his five senses. For
example, he knows Skellig has wings because he first feels them on Skellig’s back,
“[l]ike thin arms, folded up. Springy and flexible,” and because he sees them with
his own eyes (Almond 1999: 30). Indeed, Michael’s first perception of Skellig relies
on vision, “that’s when I saw him” (8), and he subsequently doubts his own per-
ception, thinking later that night, “I’d never seen him at all. That had all been part
of a dream” (10). Skellig later underscores how significant vision perception is to
Michael when the man asks the boy sarcastically, “Had a good look?…. What are
you looking at, eh?” (30). That last question is, indeed, the text’s pivotal ontologi-
cal question: what is Michael looking at? Skellig is remarkable, with fingers and
knuckles “twisted and swollen” by arthritis, “hundreds of tiny creases and cracks
all over his pale face” (29). Skellig tells Michael that “Arthur Itis…. is the one that’s
ruining me bones. Turns you to stone, then crumbles you away” (31). Readers
might well wonder if Michael has simply found an old gargoyle in the garage and
is imagining it into being.
Michael invites Mina to meet Skellig. The initial scene that involves the three
of them serves the almost mechanical purpose in the text of assuring the reader
that Michael is neither imagining nor inventing this creature; Skellig has an onto-
logical reality that Mina, too, can perceive. “I’ll see whatever’s there,” she whispers
to Michael as they enter the garage, underscoring the perceptual importance of
vision to her knowledge-acquisition (74). When Michael looks at Mina as she first
observes Skellig, the boy emphasizes her embodiment: “I looked back at Mina’s
dark form looking down at us, her pale face, her mouth and eyes gaping in as-
tonishment” (75). She also underscores the cognitive importance of perception
in My Name is Mina when she writes in her journal: “Look at the world. Smell
it, taste it, listen to it, feel it, look at it. Look at it!” (2010: 31). She is discursively
portrayed as both body and mind; she is, as Lakoff and Johnson would have it,
“an embodied mind” because her cognition — particularly her perception — is
inevitably housed within her body (Lakoff & Johnson 1999: 37–38). Michael and
Skellig, too, are embodied minds in the same sense; their minds and bodies cannot
100 Literary Conceptualizations of Growth

be separated. Eventually, Skellig reveals his wings, “They were twisted and uneven,
they were covered in cracked and crooked feathers. They clicked and trembled as
they opened. They were wider than his shoulders, higher than his head” (Almond
1999: 94). Michael touches them with his fingertips and palms and feels “the bones
and sinews and muscles” that support the wings (95). When Mina asks Michael
why he is touching them, Michael’s answer reflects his attempt to understand how
he knows what he knows about his entire world:
“What you doing?” she whispered.
“Making sure the world’s still really there,” I said. (95)

Michael and Mina nurse Skellig back to health with aspirin, cod liver oil, beer, and
Chinese food. Skellig calls beer “Nectar…. the drink of the gods” (75) and Chinese
food “the food of the gods” (29), implying that he may well be a fallen god him-
self. He is an eating, breathing, thinking being who sometimes eats live rodents
and vomits pellets of their bones, just as owls do. He may be human or animal or
angel, but he is an embodied, sentient being. The text gives the reader no determi-
nant answer as to Skellig’s ontological status; rather, readers are given information
about his and others’ perceptions, embodiment, language, and thought — and are
left to draw their own conclusions. After experiencing Skellig, Michael and Mina
grow to trust their own perceptions, acknowledging that what they are seeing is
both real and miraculous. Readers are thus invited to conclude that acknowledg-
ing embodied perception is a key component of mature cognition.
Mina is specifically embodied as “little and she had hair as black as coal and
the kind of eyes you think you can see right through” (Almond 1999: 25); she fre-
quently sits in trees. She describes herself in My Name Is Mina as “very skinny and
very small and she had jet-black hair and a pale face and shining eyes” (Almond
2010: 43). Her doctors believe that she should be medicated to “make her feel
better,” but her mother understands, “They’ll stop her from feeling anything at
all. She’s not some kind of robot. She’s a little girl that’s growing up” (44). Mina’s
mother thus makes a direct link between the embodiment of physical growth and
psychological growth. She tells her daughter that as she grows, “she’d feel stronger
more often and not feel so small” (43). That is, growth involves both body and
mind. This second novel is direct in discussing cognition in terms of the mind and
human thought when Mina insists in her journal that her mind “is not in order.
My mind is not straight lines. My mind is a clutter and a mess. It is my mind, but
it is also very like other minds. And like all minds, like every mind that there has
ever been and every mind that there will ever be, it is a place of wonder. !THE
MIND IS A PLACE OF WONDER!” (11–12). As My Name is Mina draws to a
close, Mina and her mother stare at the stars, and her mother tenderly cradles her
daughter’s head in her hands. “I can nearly hold your whole head in my hands,”
 Chapter 5. Epistemology, ontology, and the philosophy of experientialism 101

she tells Mina; “Your head holds all those stars, all that darkness, all these noises. It
holds the universe” (282). She then rests her daughter’s head against her own and
says, “Two heads, two universes, interlinked” (282). Again, the text is connect-
ing embodiment and cognition, this time with an affirmation that human society
depends upon our ability to recognize each other as embodied minds that are de-
pendent on one another. In other words, Mina’s mother is teaching her daughter
something about her own values: it is a good thing to recognize and appreciate
that other people have their own intricate and complex thought processes. The
philosophical implications are rich: our being, our ontological status, depends on
our embodied minds, as does our epistemology, our ability to know what we know.
But even more important, without the ability to recognize each other as embodied
minds, we would not have the ability to treat each other ethically, with the values
that acknowledge and respect the other. Because Mina is learning to value the
complexity of other people’s minds, she can accept the complexity of Skellig’s when
she meets him — and she values him enough to help him. Mina must, however,
first grow to understand her own cognitive complexity. As Mina later writes in her
journal, “Does everybody feel this excitement, this astonishment, as they grow? I
close my eyes and stare into the universe inside myself ” (Almond 2010: 287).
In My Name Is Mina, Mina writes about how she observes Michael’s embodi-
ment almost entirely in terms of action and emotion (as opposed to writing about
him in terms of thinking): he “stare[s] glumly” at the yard in his new home and
“kick[s] it hard” (13, 31); he bounces his ball in the yard, against the garden wall,
and against the garage (262–263). “He glares at the street as if he hates it” (263).
She notices his “[c]lenched fists. Hard eyes” — and she agrees with her mother
that he needs a friend now that he has moved into a new neighborhood (294). The
character Skellig does not appear in My Name Is Mina, but in Skellig, the mystical
creature also demonstrates a relationship between embodied action and emotion.
Three times, Skellig holds hands with children and dances with them in a circle in
ways that enliven them: twice with Mina and Michael, once with Michael’s baby
sister who is dying but becomes miraculously revived by Skellig’s dance. In the
first dance, Skellig “seemed stronger than he’d ever been. He took my hand and
Mina’s hand,” and the three circle in and out of light and darkness in a moonlit at-
tic until they are whirling so fast that:
Each face spun from shadow to light, from shadow to light, from shadow to light,
and each time the faces of Mina and Skellig came into the light they were more
silvery, more expressionless. Their eyes were darker, more empty, more penetrat-
ing…. It was like we had moved into each other, like we had become one thing.
(Almond 1999: 119–120)
102 Literary Conceptualizations of Growth

Eventually, Michael perceives “ghostly wings” growing on Mina’s back (120).

Skellig calls the two children “a pair of angels” and tells them that he has been
healed by “the owls and the angels” (166, 120). Later, he dances with Michael’s
baby sister and perhaps heals her, and in his final meeting with Michael and Mina,
they dance again in a circle: “We began to turn. Our hearts and breath were to-
gether. We turned and turned until the ghostly wings rose from Mina’s back and
mine, until we felt ourselves being raised, until we seemed to turn and dance in
the empty air” (167). Although Skellig expresses few emotions other than pain
and frustration early in the novel, by the time he has regained enough health to
initiate action himself, his actions create emotional catharsis for those who move
with him.
Michael, Mina, and Skellig all demonstrate the impossibility of the Cartesian
split. That is, none of them can know without embodied experiences that affect
their rationality and being. As French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty writes
in his refusal to accept the Cartesian split, “I’m conscious of the world through the
medium of my body” (1962: 82). Sensory perceptions affect Michael’s, Mina’s, and
Skellig’s thoughts — which are clearly embodied — and the abilities and limita-
tions of their bodies subsequently cause them to make the value judgments they
do. Michael and Mina, for example, perceive Skellig’s embodied suffering and
consciously decide to come to his aid. As they help him heal, he heals others —
including them and Michael’s baby sister. Additionally, My Name Is Mina actively
expresses how important it is for humans to recognize that we are extraordinary
beings, despite the pain that surrounds us. As Mina puts it: “this horrible world
is so blooming beautiful and so blooming weird that sometimes I think it’ll make
me faint!” (Almond 2010: 31). Mina tells Skellig he is beautiful twice (Almond
1999: 85, 94). She is acknowledging that he is beautiful because he exists as an em-
bodied being, both viscerally and cognitively. Her growth — like Michael’s — de-
pends upon reason as an embodied faculty — and that cognitive ability to reason
depends upon conceptualizations that involve ontology, epistemology, and a value
system predicated on those conceptualizations.

The cognitive unconscious and metaphorical thought

Cognitive linguists explore both the brain and thought as interrelated phenomena;
thinking cannot happen independently of a biologically-situated brain. They also
acknowledge that most cognition is unconscious thought, rather than conscious.
Lakoff and Johnson even assert: “It is a rule of thumb among cognitive scientists
that unconscious thought is 95 percent of all thought — and that may be a serious
underestimate” (1999: 13). As I have noted in Chapter 1, these cognitive linguists
 Chapter 5. Epistemology, ontology, and the philosophy of experientialism 103

also argue that human thought — both conscious and unconscious — depends
heavily upon categorization, which they understand as the brain’s primary form
of cognition. For example, when Mina divides the world into the value-driven and
perhaps overlapping descriptions “blooming beautiful” and “blooming weird,” she
is categorizing, without even realizing that she is. Categorization, in turn, affects
how our brains manage information in the form of concepts. How we know what
we know depends on our ability to separate categories from each other: chair from
child; anger from joy; beautiful from weird. Concepts, in turn, lead to conceptual
structures, or conceptualizations, with which our brains can understand compli-
cated concepts such as “emotions” as one category and “anger” or “joy” or “grief ”
as more specific categories within that structure — and our cognition allows us to
understand that categories such as “joy” and “happiness” are more interconnected
than “joy” and “anger.”
Moreover, as we have seen, cognitive linguistics emphasizes how dependent
upon embodiment our conceptual structures are. As I discussed in Chapter 1, at
an early age, we develop the ability to create categories based on our bodies: “here”
is closer to our bodies than “there”; “being full” is a concept we understand both
from eating and from relying on our sense of sight and sense of touch to perceive
containers being filled (Lakoff & Johnson 1980: 51; Lakoff & Johnson 1999: 31–
35). Because we define concepts in terms of our bodies, we systematically create
and rely on embodied metaphors.
Not unlike Anne of Green Gables, Skellig relies on the embodied metaphor that
maps vision on to understanding. For example, when Michael takes Mina into the
garage to be witness to the phenomenon he has found there, he tells her: “I’m wor-
ried that you won’t see what I think I see” (Almond 1999: 74, italics added). On one
level, Michael is worrying that Mina won’t share the same visual perception that
he has, but on a far more significant metaphorical level, he is worrying that Mina
won’t understand, that Mina won’t accept that Skellig is real. Michael connects
directly the concepts of “thinking” and “seeing” when he says “what I think I see”
(74). Later, Mina and Michael talk to Mina’s mother about various types of visions,
including William Blake’s. Here, too, humans structure concepts of the spiritual
and mystical using an embodied metaphor of sight, visions. Mina’s mother shows
them Blake’s drawings of his visions and then says, “Maybe we could all see such
beings, if only we knew how to…. But it’s enough for me to have you two angels
at my table”; “Yes,” she continues, “Isn’t it amazing? I see you clearly, two angels at
my table” (132, italics added). The perception of seeing and the cognitive act of
understanding are structurally fused in this woman’s dialogue. Moreover, charac-
ters in this novel often say, “See?” as shorthand for “do you understand?” (Almond
1999: 22, 37, 58), and on the very first page when Michael describes discovering
Skellig, his narration establishes the conceptual connection between the embodied
104 Literary Conceptualizations of Growth

perception of seeing and the embodied concept of understanding: “I’d soon begin
to see the truth about him, that there’d never been another creature like him in the
world” (1, italics added). Michael demonstrates how embodied experience — that
is, experientialism — structures our epistemology.
Another set of conceptual metaphors in Skellig and My Name Is Mina involves
a quotation from William Blake that hangs next to Mina’s bed: “How can a bird
that is born for joy / Sit in a cage and sing?” (Almond 1999: 50). Mina uses the met-
aphor of the caged bird to explain why she does not attend school: “schools inhibit
the natural curiosity, creativity, and intelligence of children. The mind needs to be
opened out into the world, not shuttered down inside a gloomy classroom” (49).
The metaphor is a complex one: CHILDREN ARE BIRDS is mapped onto SCHOOLS
ARE CAGES, which Mina reiterates in My Name is Mina (Almond 2010: 18). When
Mina is assigned a writing task on her school’s standardized, high-stakes testing
day, she stares out the window at the birds, which are free, unlike her. The head
teacher stares from the hallway through the glass door of their classroom, empha-
sizing how caged the children are. Mina, however, has already understood lan-
guage in terms of imprisonment and power, having written in her journal, “I’ll
try to make my words break out of the cages of sadness, and make them sing for
joy” (Almond 2010: 19). She writes, “My stories were like me. They couldn’t be
controlled and they couldn’t fit in” (15). Her teacher, whom she calls Mrs. Scullery,
has told her “that I should not write anything until I had planned what I would
write. What nonsense!…. Does a bird plan its song before it sings? OF COURSE
IT DOES NOT! It opens its beak and it SINGS so I will SING!” (12–13). And,
indeed, Mina learns that nonsensical language can help her break free from the
prison cage of school. During the high-stakes test, she answers the prompt, “Write
a description of a busy place,” with a nonsense essay entitled “Glibbertysnark”
(160–161). It opens, “In thi biginin glibbertysnark woz doon in the woositinima-
na. Golgy golgy golgy than, wiss wandigle,” and continues to describe the glibber-
tysnark’s adventures in a busy place (161–162). The head teacher and teacher, both
unamused, fail to understand the nonsense, and so Mina’s mother elects to home-
school her. Mina is “VERY VERY VERY PLEASED” that she has been “TAKEN
OUT OF SCHOOL!” (163). No longer its prisoner, she sits in a tree, bird-like,
observing a nest of blackbird’s eggs as they first hatch and later grow to hatchlings.
Her mother tells her “I can imagine you as a bird,” and Mina imagines that the
blackbirds think she is “some kind of weird bird” herself (80, 24). She learns about
the archaeopteryx, the winged dinosaur from whom all birds evolved — and who
makes a reappearance in Skellig. She meets the owls who live in the attic of her
grandfather’s house in My Name Is Mina, and those owls also reappear when Mina
and Michael take Skellig to shelter him in that attic and the owls begin to feed
him. At various points in My Name is Mina, she thinks about bats, goldfinches,
 Chapter 5. Epistemology, ontology, and the philosophy of experientialism 105

skylarks, chickens, and starlings; references to eggs and to angels fill the pages of
both books. Michael’s teacher talks about Icarus and his wings melting in Skellig,
and both children talk to their parents about whether or not shoulder blades have
been left over, after evolution, from the place where wings once grew.
At one level, CHILDREN ARE BIRDS and SCHOOLS ARE CAGES operate as fairly
traditional (and obvious) symbolism. The children, after all, live on the none-too-
subtly named “Falconer Road.” Almond extends the traditional use of bird sym-
bolism, however, both linguistically and philosophically. Linguistically, Almond
uses a cluster of words surrounding the idea of flight to evoke cognitive freedom.
Mina suggests in her journal, “Sleep while you fly. Fly while you sleep” (Almond
2010: 202). She loves afternoons with her mother when “ideas grow and take flight”
(87). In Skellig, Michael’s English teacher tells him to “let your imagination fly”
(155). He also dreams that his sister is a baby bird in a nest; when he is awake and
she has had her recuperative surgery, he observes her arching “her back like she
was about to dance or fly” (Almond 1999: 180). At one point, Mina climbs out of
her tree feeling disoriented, “like I was coming out from a poem or a story, or like
I was a poem or a story myself. Or like I was coming out from an egg!” (191). She
believes that “words should wander and meander. They should fly like owls and
flicker like bats,” and some pages of her journal “will be like a sky with a single bird
in it. Some will be like a sky with a swirling swarm of starlings in it. My sentences
will be a clutch, a collection, a pattern, a swarm, a shoal, a mosaic. They will be a
circus, a menagerie, a tree, a nest” (11). She despises people who are “bird trappers
… who trap the spirit, people who cage the soul” (180). Mina also reminds the
reader again that schools are “CAGES and PLACES TO BE AVOIDED!” (Almond
2010: 123).
This interconnected set of metaphors demonstrates how entailment affects
conceptualization. If we think about the imagination “taking flight,” we at least
temporarily limit how we are thinking about imagination and so are not likely
to simultaneously think about it in other terms — say, by way of contrast, think-
ing of imagination as spontaneous combustion or fertile soil. Since the following
concepts all belong to the conceptual category of birds — flight/flying, cages/traps,
emerging from eggs — these entailments work together in these two novels to
link linguistically the concepts of children and freedom. Almond’s use of this cat-
egorical entailment is consistent and intricate. While some readers of Skellig may
miss the point that children need freedom, no reader of My Name is Mina possi-
bly could. Mina makes the point directly in her journal: “CHILDREN HAVE TO
BE LEFT ALONE SOMETIMES!…. SOMETIMES CHILDREN MUST BE LEFT
ALONE TO BE STILL AND SILENT, AND TO DO” (Almond 2010: 111).
Another complex network of entailments in these two novels involves the un-
derworld, Persephone, death, and the use of “dead” as an adjective, as in “dead
106 Literary Conceptualizations of Growth

easy and dead stupid” (Almond 2010: 92). When Michael first hears Skellig in
the garage, he hears a gentle scratching sound, and then “dead quiet” (Almond
1999: 4); his baby sister’s face is “dead white” before she is healed, and her hair
is “dead black” (11). The use of “dead” as slang for “very” is not accidental: Mina
is working through her grief that her father has died; Michael is facing his grief
that his sister might die — and their experiences with Skellig seem like a brush
with death. “I thought he was dead,” Michael says upon first meeting Skellig (1).
Furthermore, in My Name is Mina, Mina attempts to journey into the underworld
by exploring an abandoned mine, and she thumps on the earth in the spring to
awaken Persephone. When Michael suggests naming his newly healed baby sister
“Persephone,” his father rejects the name, and they give her instead a more con-
sistently life-affirming name, “Joy” (Almond 1999: 182). Ideas about death and the
underworld intertwine to invoke ontological questions about what it means to be
a living body — and the adjective “dead” itself becomes the linguistic intensifier
that underscores the importance of this type of philosophical questioning. Thus,
these texts explore ideas about what it means to be “dead” — as opposed to “alive”
— both linguistically and philosophically. In other words, Mina and Michael are
conceptualizing Heideggerian Being-towards-death as a logical stage of their ma-
turing and embodied reason.
Both Skellig and My Name is Mina employ a network of entailments involving
the metaphor THE LIVING BODY IS A CONTAINER. Mina’s mother, after all, has told
her that her brain “holds the universe” (Almond 2010: 282); that is, Mina’s brain is
a container that holds ideas. People in the hospital “lay exhausted, filled with pain”
(Almond 1999: 66, italics added); Mina’s teacher accuses her of being “full of noth-
ing but stupid crackpot notions” (Almond 2010: 155, italics added); Mina is happy
when someone tells her to live her life well, “Live it to the full” (Almond 2010: 72,
italics added). This entailment ultimately involves various ontological and epis-
temological questions: What is the human body? What is thought? How are we
filled with knowledge about our bodies’ being? How do we think about our bod-
ies as containers? But these uses of the words filled and full also demonstrate how
linguistic entailments shape human thought. It is almost impossible not to think
of our bodies as containers, but here, Mina’s ability to conceptualize ontological
status emerges from what she knows and how she knows it; her epistemology is
shaped by her embodiment.
Thus, the linguistic entailments in Skellig and My Name Is Mina also serve
the philosophical issues at work in these novels. Although Skellig’s ontological
status is never defined, the novels return time and again to questions about what
defines the living human body, how things are created, what it means to live Being-
towards-death, and what happens after humans die. For example, Mina observes
that most household dust is actually particles of dead human skin: “lots of people’s
 Chapter 5. Epistemology, ontology, and the philosophy of experientialism 107

skin mingles together and dances in the light, and the skin of the living and the
skin of the dead mingle together and dance in the light!” (Almond 2010: 73).
Moreover, she thinks of herself as a mortal container when she observes that “[t]he
human body is 65 percent water. Two-thirds of me is constantly disappearing and
constantly being replaced. So most of me is not me at all!” (124). Mina also won-
ders how new things are created. As she writes, she thinks, “Look at the way the
words move across the page and fill the empty spaces. Did God feel like this when
he started to fill the emptiness? Is there a God? Was there ever emptiness?” (15,
italics added). Later in the novel, she again equates writing, language, and creative
power: “Maybe writing was a bit like being God. Every word was the start of a new
creation” (237). More than the other characters in these two novels, Mina puts into
words the nature of what it means to create something and how we know what that
feels like. Ultimately, she is questioning the ontological status of human creation.
The most basic philosophical question in both novels may be the one that
Mina and Michael both ask Skellig, “What are you?” (Almond 1999: 78, 167).
When Michael asks the question, Skellig answers: “Something like you, something
like a beast, something like a bird, something like an angel” (167). Mina specu-
lates, however, that “the only possible angels might be us,” implying the ontological
sameness of angels and humans (Almond 2010: 29). As for birds, they are “quite
extraordinary enough without having souls” (77); “If there is a God,” Mina writes,
“could it be that he’s chosen the birds to speak for him?” (66). She emphasizes this
point in her journal: “THE VOICE OF GOD SPEAKS THROUGH THE BEAKS
OF BIRDS” (66). Although Mina tells Michael in Skellig that her father is in heaven
“watching us” (Almond 1999: 50), she writes in the prequel that “I don’t really be-
lieve in Heaven at all, and I don’t believe in perfect angels. I think that this might
be the only Heaven there can possibly be, this world we live in now, but that we
haven’t quite realized it yet” (Almond 2010: 29). Moreover, Mina tells Michael that
Blake believed souls could “leap” out of the body and back into it, relying on the
container metaphor that the body is a container in which to hold the soul. Mina
then defines the soul leaping out of the body-as-container using a dance meta-
phor: “That’s what [Blake] said. The soul leaps out and then leaps back again….
It’s like a dance” (Almond 1999: 152). That dance, of course, is reflected in Skellig’s
circular dancing that seems to meld the souls of the dancers together.
Skellig and My Name is Mina are no more determinant about who we are as
humans and how we know what we know what we know than the texts are in de-
fining Skellig’s ontological status. And yet the very asking of the questions leads to
a significant set of value judgments: we may not know who we are, but we need to
care for those who need us, such as Skellig and Michael’s sister and the baby birds
that Mina and her mother defend from a marauding cat. Both texts clearly imply
that children should be given the freedom to observe life, analyze it, and decide for
108 Literary Conceptualizations of Growth

themselves how to live it. We may not entirely understand our own being and how
we know what we know, according to these novels, but maturation requires us to
understand our own values and lead ethical lives, nonetheless. Anything related to
our epistemology, ontology, and values are shaped entirely by how our conceptu-
alizations have been influenced by experience as we grow.

The ontology and epistemology of racial construction

In his preface to The Order of Things (1994), Foucault cites the magic realist Jorge
Luis Borges, who points out in an article on analytical language that it is funda-
mentally impossible to categorize the universe: “obviously there is no classification
of the universe that is not arbitrary and conjectural. The reason is very simple: we
do not know what thing the universe is” (Borges 2000: 104). Borges cites an an-
cient Chinese encyclopedia that lists an incongruent series of descriptors to divide
animals into such categories as “(a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c)
tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens,” and so on (Borges, cited in Foucault 1994: xv).
Foucault uses the encyclopedia to define categorization as “a table, a tabula, that
enables thought to operate upon the entities of our world, to put them in order, to
divide them into classes, to group them according to names that designate their
similarities and their differences” (Foucault 1994: xvii). Foucault is preoccupied
here with differences and how “since the beginning of time, language has inter-
sected space” (1994: xvii). That is, language systems, or discourse, create episte-
mologies by which people order information.
Foucault does not quibble with Borges about humanity’s fundamental inabil-
ity to know what the universe is, but Foucault does analyze how categorization
became the predominant episteme of the Classical age (1994: 57–58). That is, the
scientific discourse of the Enlightenment led scholars to an epistemology of clas-
sification — the best example of which is biological taxonomy. While cognitive
scientists like Lakoff and Johnson might argue that categorization is cognitively
inevitable, the fact remains that it was only in the Enlightenment that categoriza-
tion became a privileged form of epistemology.
Following Foucault, Cornel West documents how race, as a category of op-
pression, was also an outgrowth of Enlightenment thinking; he links the discursive
construction of white supremacy to an epistemological shift that privileged the sci-
entific revolution’s willingness to categorize based on perceived notions of biologi-
cal difference (1999: 70–75). Race, in other words, is an epistemology predicated
on discourse, not biology; it was the pseudo-scientific language of racial catego-
rization that created race. Audrey Smedley defines race itself as an epistemology:
 Chapter 5. Epistemology, ontology, and the philosophy of experientialism 109

“Race” is a shorthand term for, as well as a symbol of, a “knowledge system,” a way
of knowing, of perceiving, and of interpreting the world, and of rationalizing its
contents (in this case, other human beings) in terms that are derived from previ-
ous cultural-historical experience and reflective contemporary social values, rela-
tionships, and conditions. Every culture has its own ways of perceiving the world;
race is the kaleidoscope through which Americans have been conditioned in our
culture to view other human beings. (2007: 15)

Aileen Moreton-Robinson also relies on Foucauldian logic to argue that “[w]hite-

ness as an epistemological a priori provides for a way of knowing and being that
is predicated on superiority, which becomes normalised and forms part of one’s
taken-for-granted knowledge” (2005: 75–76).
As the epistemology of race shifted in the eighteenth century, so too did the
ontological status of non-whites — but “whiteness” had to be invented as a racial
category first to create the binary of “white” and “non-white” (Allen 2002: 32). As
Theodore Allen observes: the concept of the “white race” was invented in the era
of colonialization to justify “reduc[ing] all members of the oppressed group to one
undifferentiated social status, a status beneath that of any member of any social
class within the colonizing population. This is the hallmark of racial oppression
in its colonial origins, and as it has persisted in subsequent historical contexts”
(2002: 32, italics in the original). Similarly, Edward Said reminds us that the epis-
temology of so-called Western thinking depends on this binary discourse of the
racialized other: “European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself
off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self ” (2003: 3).
Please note that Foucault is himself being Orientalist when he analyzes Borges’ use
of the Chinese encyclopedia:
[I]s not China precisely this privileged site of space?…. Even its writing does not
reproduce the fugitive flight of the voice in horizontal lines; it erects the motion-
less and still-recognizable images of things themselves in vertical columns. So
much so that the Chinese encyclopaedia quoted by Borges, and the taxonomy it
proposes, lead to a kind of thought without space, to words and categories that
lack all life and place, but are rooted in a ceremonial space, overburdened with
complex figures, with tangled paths, strange places, secret passages, and unex-
pected communications. There would appear to be, then, at the other extremity of
the earth we inhabit, a culture entirely devoted to the ordering of space, but one
that does not distribute the multiplicity of existing things into any of the catego-
ries that make it possible for us to name, speak, and think. (Foucault 1994: xix,
italics in the original)
110 Literary Conceptualizations of Growth

In other words, Foucault, the philosopher who studies categorization in terms of

an intellectual archaeology, himself succumbs to the Enlightenment-era racism
that predicates superiority on superficial categories of otherness.
Ron Mallon (2006) notes that the resulting epistemological shift following
post-Enlightenment thinking led to three ontological views of race, all of which
depend on or negate ideas of difference. Racialism posits that race is inherently
biological, a view that most contemporary theorists now reject. The extreme re-
jection of this view is racial skepticism, an argument that race does not exist at
all, which Mallon calls “the ontological consensus,” since most theorists no longer
believe race is a biological category (2006: 529). Racial skeptics reject what Mallon
identifies as “race talk” because they believe that any discourse acknowledging
race only perpetuates cultural racism (526). Mallon defines race talk as “the prac-
tices of using terms like ‘race,’ ‘white,’ ‘black,’ ‘Asian,’ and ‘Hispanic’ (and their as-
sociated concepts) to label and differentially treat persons” (526). In between these
positions of racialism and racial skepticism is social constructionism: “Like their
skeptical opponents, racial constructionists infer from the failure of racialism that
race is not a biological kind. But unlike racial skeptics, racial constructionists seek
to develop an account on which race does exist but is a socially constructed kind
of thing” (Mallon 2006: 534). Constructionists understand that there is nothing
essential or biologically inherent in people that determines their race, but they
still acknowledge that cultural forces require people to experience race as part of
their identity — especially if they are labeled non-white and living in a western
culture. As Charles Mills explains, “race can be ontological without being biologi-
cal” (1998: xiv). Mills describes the “racial contract” as the epistemological system
created by whites to justify “the differential privileging of the whites as a group
with respect to the nonwhites as a group, the exploitation of their bodies, lands,
and resources, and the denial of equal socioeconomic opportunities to them. All
whites are beneficiaries of the Contract, though some whites are not signatories to
it” (Mills 1999: 11, italics in the original). My argument is built on the premise that
race is a discursive social construct, a cognitive categorization, that saturates the
lives of adolescents in many Western countries, reinforcing false epistemologies of
difference. Multicultural novels about maturation almost always depict the protag-
onist’s maturation as being implicated in this categorization and its concomitant
conceptualizations of race.
Like race, adolescence is also a cultural construct predicated on differential
privileging of power. Unlike race, however, age does have a biological component:
human development involves physiological changes from infancy to childhood
and from puberty to adulthood and old age. Various theories — and cultures —
rely on discourse to define this stage of life differently; prior to the twentieth cen-
tury, western cultures did not even have the discourse that established adolescence
 Chapter 5. Epistemology, ontology, and the philosophy of experientialism 111

as a life-stage.1 Although the earliest theorists of adolescence defined it as a purely

biological concept (just as early theorists of race did), most scholars of adolescence
now understand the concept to be more influenced by discourse and cultural con-
struction than by physiology (Mintz 2004: 196–199).2 Maturation, of course, is
no more of a binary than race is; people age across a spectrum throughout their
lives. Nonetheless, adults frequently employ discourse to transform the spectrum
of aging into a binary: people can be categorized as either “adult” or “non-adult.”
Empowerment plays perhaps the biggest role in defining this binary because adults
typically have more socio-economic and political power than teenagers. Maria
Nikolajeva (2009) identifies this power as aetonormativity: adults define norms in
all cultures, so normativity is always already a function of maturity. As Nikolajeva
explains, aetonormativity comes from the root word for “age,” aeto- (2009: 8). The
carnivalesque interrogations of power issues in children’s and adolescent litera-
ture, Nikolajeva argues, help to “queer” the dynamic established by adult norms
(2009: 6–10). In western cultures, it is adults, specifically white adults, who define
the racial contract — and societal prescriptions demand that adolescents learn to
think of themselves as racial beings. If by the time young people reach adolescence
they have not begun to define themselves in terms of race and age, they are often
forced to, at least within the confines of adolescent literature.
For example, a character in Walter Mosley’s 47 acknowledges that the cog-
nitive categories of race and age intersect, particularly in racism’s infantilizing
effects: “White peoples gots as many ages as you can count but slaves on’y gots
four ages. That’s babychile, boy or girl, old boy or old girl, an’ dead” (2005: 1).
The speaker knows that each slave’s social status is reinforced by these terms, all
of which are defined by white oppressors to reinforce racial difference, and all of
which are predicated on the notion that whiteness is different (somehow) than
non-whiteness — just as adulthood is different (somehow) than non-adulthood.
To varying degrees, 47 — much like The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time
Indian — also demonstrates how authors strive to empower readers by asking them
to confront racial categorization as part of their own maturation. Nevertheless, al-
though the protagonists in both of these novels follow the bildungsroman-inspired
trajectory of characters growing to increased maturity, the adolescent characters
who grow are never permitted to grow into a maturity that precludes the exis-
tence of racism. That is, while these authors problematize race and racism, they

1. See Steven Mintz, Huck’s Raft (2004). Mintz cites G. Stanley Hall’s 1904 work Adolescence as
the book that “systematized earlier ideas about youth that could be traced at least as far back as
Rousseau’s Emile” (Mintz 2004: 196).
2. See also Adams and Berzonsky (2006: xxi–xxiii) and Christenbury, Bomer, and Smagorinsky
(2009: 3–10).
112 Literary Conceptualizations of Growth

never confront the fact that racism is an unavoidable function of adulthood in

the Americas. Indeed, as Smedley observes, “race is a pervasive element in the
cognitive patterning of Western thought and experience” (2007: 1). Especially in
the United States, with its horrific legacy of slavery still affecting American con-
ceptualizations of otherness, many YA novels demonstrate how race pervades cog-
nition. Specifically, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian and 47 show
adolescents that they can outgrow the racist experiences of their adolescence, but
they can never completely outgrow the cultural narratives that construct race.

Categorization, and epistemology: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time

Indian

Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian involves a

Spokane Indian, Arnold Spirit, who cognitively understands race in very embodied
ways: he is an artist who draws cartoons of himself, his family, and his friends that
emphasize their bodies, facial features, and hair. Arnold decides to go to a white high
school, twenty-two miles from his home, rather than continue to attend the pover-
ty-stricken school on his reservation. Arnold is brutally honest about all forms of
racism, which he attributes to white settlers — that is, white adults: “Of course,” he
says, “ever since white people showed up and brought along their Christianity and
their fears of eccentricity, Indians have gradually lost all of their tolerance. Indians
can be just as judgmental and hateful as any white person” (Alexie 2007: 155). He
defines the ontological status of the Indian in terms of generational poverty: “My
parents came from poor people who came from poor people who came from poor
people, all the way back to the very first poor people” (11). He recognizes that pov-
erty affects how people experience their world, how they know it:
It sucks to be poor, and it sucks to feel that you somehow deserve to be poor. You
start believing that you’re poor because you’re stupid and ugly. And then you start
believing that you’re stupid and ugly because you’re Indian. And because you’re
Indian you start believing you’re destined to be poor. It’s an ugly circle and there’s
nothing you can do about it. (13, italics in the original)

Arnold recognizes that the ontological condition of poverty creates a subsequent

epistemology of poverty that is linked to racism — and, in his tribe’s case, to a
specifically embodied phenomenon: alcoholism. Arguing against Tolstoy’s assess-
ment of unhappy families being unhappy in different ways, Junior asserts, “Well,
I hate to argue with a Russian genius, but Tolstoy didn’t know Indians. And he
didn’t know that all Indian families are unhappy for the same exact reason: the
fricking booze” (200).
 Chapter 5. Epistemology, ontology, and the philosophy of experientialism 113

Racism in this novel takes a number of disturbing forms. A white man threat-
ens Arnold and his girlfriend: “if you get my daughter pregnant, if you make some
charcoal babies, I’m going to disown her” (109). Another white man exploits
Native American culture by trading in beaded costumes and justifying his behav-
ior because he “feels Indian” in his “bones”: “I love Indians. I love your songs, your
dances, and your souls. And I love your art. I collect Indian art” (162–163). Arnold
understands him to be someone who commodifies Native American culture, mak-
ing “Indians feel like insects pinned to a display board” (163). Native Americans
discriminate against each other in this novel, categorizing each other as “apple[s]”
for acting “red on the outside and white on the inside” (132), and Arnold feels like
“like two different people inside of one body” (61). Thus, the novel uses a variety
of metaphors to show how race is conceptualized as a set of ontological categories,
all of which depend on concepts of superiority and inferiority.
The worst result of racism in the novel involves alcohol. According to Arnold
Spirit, because Indians can no longer be nomadic, they have “forgotten that res-
ervations were meant to be death camps” (217). They have collectively lost hope
because they are trapped forever on these reservations. In the narrator’s cultural
critique of his tribe’s ontological status, he argues that too many Native Americans
console themselves with alcohol — supplied, of course, by a white culture invested
in ensuring that Native American cultures remain impoverished. Five different
characters in the novel die in alcohol-related deaths. Arnold’s grandmother, who
has never had a single drink in her life, is run over by a drunk driver, who is also
Native American. Another Native American man shoots his best friend over the
last drink in a wine bottle; that man later kills himself in remorse. Perhaps the
most horrifying deaths occur when Arnold’s sister and her husband are too drunk
to realize their mobile home is on fire. As Arnold puts it: “That’s really the biggest
difference between Indians and white people…. All my white friends can count
their deaths on one hand” (200); but Arnold has been to forty-two funerals, and
“90 percent of the deaths have been because of alcohol” (200). In Alexie’s cultural
critique, alcohol, race, and poverty are inevitably linked — and they are the direct
legacy of white exploitation of Native Americans and their lands.
This harsh realism shifts, however, after his sister’s almost surreal death, at
which time Arnold experiences an incident that relies on altered laws of the uni-
verse. His initial reactions to the news of her death are inappropriate: he has an
erection when the guidance counselor who delivers the news hugs him, and he
laughs hysterically for quite awhile after hearing what has happened. Then some-
thing fantastic occurs. “I was laughing so hard that I threw up a little bit in my
mouth. I spit out a little piece of cantaloupe. Which was weird, because I don’t
like cantaloupe…. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten the evil fruit” (205).
Arnold remembers that his sister loved cantaloupe — and he abruptly falls asleep
114 Literary Conceptualizations of Growth

and dreams about a school picnic he attended when he was a seven-year-old.

During the picnic, he ate seven pieces of cantaloupe — “I’d eaten so much canta-
loupe that I’d turned into a cantaloupe” (206) — and he then got stung on the face
by a wasp and was hospitalized. The text leaves the regurgitated cantaloupe the
day of his sister’s death completely unexplained. Nothing provides for the possibil-
ity that he has vomited something “like” cantaloupe from his body; the text says
simply that the character “threw up a little bit” in his mouth and then “spit[s] out
a little piece of cantaloupe” (206). The text is unambiguous: Arnold has vomited
a food he has not eaten in seven years. When Arnold vomits something he has
not eaten since childhood he is demonstrating embodied consciousness at work.
Arnold is literally abjecting his thoughts of his sister from his own body. He asso-
ciates Mary with cantaloupe — and cantaloupe with the pain of having been stung
by a wasp while eating cantaloupe seven years earlier — so he is metaphorically
cleansing his body of both Mary and the pain of her death.
Interrogating Julia Kristeva’s work in Powers of Horror (1982), Karen Coats
demonstrates how abjection operates in adolescent literature (2004: 137–160). The
“clean and proper” social body expulses the undesirable, which becomes espe-
cially compelling during adolescence because it is a stage during which the abject
takes on significant psychological power in terms of “three categories of bodily
abjection — oral, anal, and sexual” (Coats 2004: 143). Coats specifically connects
adolescence to abjection:
At the level of the social, we think of adolescence in terms of the way it, like abjec-
tion, breaches and challenges boundaries. It is an in-between time, a time where
what we know and believe about children is challenged, and where what we hope
and value about maturity is also challenged. (142)

Coats implies that adolescence is effectively a cultural categorization. Moreover,

throughout The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, the issue of abjection
is connected to the United States government’s policy regarding Native Americans:
Indians have been pushed to the social rim of “white” culture to “cleanse” the so-
cial body and make way for white settlers to own land that has previously been
held communally by indigenous peoples. As Coats observes, “Throughout social
history, the exclusions of peoples based on race, sexuality, and disabilities have es-
tablished and bolstered both personal and national identities” (2004: 141). Alexie
relies on embodied consciousness here both to protest the abjection of Indians
from Euro-American culture and to depict how embodied the physical grief of
this one character has subsequently become. His grief is so physical he is literally
abjecting memories of his sister.
The point about the cultural abjection of Native Americans is emphasized near
the end of the novel when Arnold re-narrates a story his father has told him. Turtle
 Chapter 5. Epistemology, ontology, and the philosophy of experientialism 115

Lake is unusual in its perfect roundness and its depth. No one wants to swim there
because some years ago, a horse — dubbed Stupid Horse — has drowned in the
lake, which has metaphorically received its name because it is shaped like a turtle.
“There were all sorts of myths and legends surrounding the lake. I mean, we’re
Indians, and we like to make up shit about lakes” (Alexie 2007: 222). Turtle Lake
is thus identified with native culture. Within a few weeks of drowning in Turtle
Lake, however, Stupid Horse’s carcass mysteriously washes up on the shores of
Benjamin Lake, which is ten miles away. Two things are salient about Benjamin
Lake. The narrator describes trees on the reservation so old that they “were alive
when Benjamin Franklin was born” two pages prior to Arnold’s description of
Turtle Lake (220), preparing readers to associate the name “Benjamin” with the
white government that has abjected Native Americans from its culture. Second,
Lake Benjamin is also associated with the pervasive poverty and adult alcoholism
of the reservation because the drunk hit-and-run driver who has killed Arnold’s
grandmother has been found “hiding out at Benjamin Lake” after the crime (157).
Thus, Stupid Horse has drowned in a lake that is conceptually linked to native cul-
ture, but the horse is subsequently abjected into a lake that is conceptually linked
to the corrupting influence of white culture.
After the people who have found the horse’s carcass drive it to the dump and
burn it, Turtle Lake itself catches fire — even though the burning horse is nowhere
near the lake. Perhaps the metaphor of fire dancing on water is one of an epiphany
— the narrator’s sister, Mary, is, after all, buried in the Catholic cemetery. But the
flames on the lake also serve metaphorically to remind the reader that “fire-water”
— alcohol itself — has been the most destructive force in the novel. Eventually,
almost inevitably, Stupid Horse’s carcass — miraculously unaffected by the fire
— washes back to Turtle Lake, where it does not rot for weeks and then abruptly
decays. The skeletal remains of the horse collapse “into a pile of bones. And the
water and the wind dragged them away” (224). Arnold calls the story “freaky” —
but he never indicates to the reader whether the narrative of Stupid Horse is to
be taken as “shit” his tribe has made up or read as mythology. Adolescent readers
are left to empower themselves by deciding whether this is an Indian legend or a
cultural critique of relations between the nations of the Spokane and the United
States — or both. Either way, this story-within-the-story helps readers conceptual-
ize the inevitable drag of Euro-American culture on Spokane culture and how the
destructiveness of “fire-water” has harmed the Spokanes’ embodiment.
Arnold’s retelling of this tale happens in the context of his reunion with his
best friend on the reservation, Rowdy. Arnold has been remembering both the sto-
ry of Stupid Horse and the day in his childhood when he and Rowdy have climbed
the tallest tree on the reservation, which proves to change Arnold’s cognitive un-
derstanding of their reservation: “We could see from one end of the reservation to
116 Literary Conceptualizations of Growth

the other. We could see our entire world. And our entire world, at that moment,
was green and golden and perfect” (226). His epistemology has shifted because he
has grown: he no longer knows the world as exclusively either Spokane or not. He
can perceive himself as having an ontological status that is both independent from
and coincident with his race. Life on the reservation is, at times, hideously ugly,
but it is also sometimes “green and golden and perfect” (226). Arnold experiences
his racial status in embodied terms, but racism is inexplicable in terms of social
construction and human ethics. “I used to think the world was broken down by
tribes,” he tells one of his teachers, “By black and white. By Indian and white. But
I know that isn’t true. The world is only broken into two tribes: The people who
are assholes and the people who are not” (176). In The Absolutely True Diary of a
Part-Time Indian, Alexie narrates two scripts of abjection: one involving a piece of
vomited cantaloupe and the other involving Stupid Horse. These scripts serve to
underscore the ultimately abject ontology of the poverty and the alcoholism that
affect the daily lives of the people in Arnold’s tribe. But Arnold knows he will con-
tinue to experience this poverty and alcoholism daily if he stays on the reservation
— even once he has grown into adulthood. Indeed, the reader is left to infer that
he will be even more racially oppressed as an adult than as a child if he succumbs
to alcoholism. The ontology of adulthood here is grim. The reader may be empow-
ered by interpreting this novel’s many layers, but the text implies that Arnold can
never grow out of the ontological experientialism of racism.

The ontology of racism: 47

In few YA novels is the collision between a mythical world and the world of real-
ism more jarring than in Mosley’s 47. The novel’s setting and characterizations are
so solidly based in historical realism that Mosley’s use of science fiction is the type
of “ontological disruption [that] serves the purpose of political and cultural dis-
ruption,” as Zamora and Faris claim magic realism strives to do (1995: 3). Mosley’s
purpose is to disrupt the traditional slave narrative so that he can provide readers
with an African-American male hero. Writing about 47, Mosley asserts:
For a long time I have known that many young black children find it hard to read
stories about slavery because of their healthy resistance to identify with victims.
My goal for this book was to create a character that rises above his role as a victim
by becoming a victorious hero.
To accomplish this end, I used the speculative and mythical genres to create
possibility where more realistic storytelling and historical perspective might not.
(Mosley, n.d.)
 Chapter 5. Epistemology, ontology, and the philosophy of experientialism 117

By inventing a hero from another world, a world where skin color doesn’t matter
but the fight against power-craving evil forces does, Mosley creates a role model
for adolescent readers of any race. More important, he has that traveler from an-
other planet teach the eponymous slave of the book’s title, who is named only
“47,” how to redefine his own self-image. “Neither master nor nigger be,” the alien
insists repeatedly to 47.3 And in time, bestowed with the power that comes from
an alternative reality, 47 accepts his destiny to become John the Conqueror (or
“High John”) and thus be a role model for twenty-first century adolescent readers.
Mosley clearly hopes his readers will never categorize themselves as either “nig-
ger” or “master” — which also have clear parallels in this text with “child” and
“adult” because of slavery’s infantilizing effects.
Tall John — who appears to 47 as an adolescent but who is actually an adult
— has searched for 47 for three thousand years, journeying through time and
outer space for the specific purpose of shifting the identity of one slave: 47. 47
expresses incredulity upon meeting Tall John, but Tall John never questions his
own ontological status, which leaves to readers the task of reconciling the issues
of the mythic and identity in this book. From his other-worldly friend, 47 eventu-
ally learns to tell other slaves that he is “Not nigger but man” (Mosley 2005: 173),
an indication that he has a perception of his ontological status that defies the dis-
cursive racism on which slavery was predicated, but significantly, he can only be
empowered as a man, not as an adolescent. During a pivotal moment in the text,
Tall John transforms 47 to his full-grown, adult size and grants 47 immortality.
Apotheosized as John the Conqueror, then, this man-god will have a new identity
and a new way of being in the world. He knows he will never be a child — or a
slave — again.
Even more directly than Alexie, Mosley writes about identity in terms of cat-
egorizations that involve both epistemology and ontology: if you know yourself
to be a “master” or “nigger,” you will be one or the other of these things. Mosley
rejects the racist discourse of the reprehensible epithet used to subjugate an entire
American racial group for centuries because he understands the effect of discourse
on self-perception and subsequently on being. 47 even refers to the way he has ac-
cepted slavery in his youth in epistemological terms: he thinks in his “slavemind”
as a child (101), but as he grows, he realizes “that the real chains that the slave wore
were the color of his skin and the defeat in his mind” (146) — something of a feint
of hand that blames the victim and undercuts Mosley’s empowering intentions. 47
tells Tall John, “I understand…. I ain’t got no mastuh ’cause I ain’t no slave” (146).
But the only way that Mosley has been able to write this critique of American
race relations has been to create a fantastic world in which an adult whose race

3. The refrain first occurs in Chapter 5 (Mosley 2005: 66).

118 Literary Conceptualizations of Growth

is incomprehensible to humans can show the inhabitants of the planet Earth how
outrageous and unbelievable the conceptualized categories by which they justify
racism are — because those categorizations are based entirely in racist cognitive
discourses. The protagonist, however, must still escape from the South and slavery,
and he must spend the rest of his adult life as an immortal fighting racism. He
cannot be empowered as an adolescent, and he can never escape the oppressive
categorizations by which racism operates. Racism is a cognitive script controlled
so well by concepts of white privilege that it becomes an unavoidable cultural nar-
rative for both white people and people of color in many works of fiction.

Conclusion

“Slavery might be the most unbelievable part of this whole story but I assure you
— it really happened,” Mosley writes in the preface to 47 (2005: viii). Racism is
unbelievable, but we can explain how it happens; we can analyze its discourses and
the attendant social practices that account for the cultural narrative of racism as
an adult norm that affects most adolescents in countries that have been implicated
in a colonialist and/or a slave-holding past. Racism is only one of the cultural nar-
ratives that profoundly affects literary conceptualizations of growth, but studying
those conceptualizations serves as an exemplar for how powerful the relationship
between categorization, conceptualization, and cultural narratives can be.
47, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, and Skellig follow a simi-
lar pattern in that they are initially about a growing adolescent, set firmly within
realism, but within the realism of a microcosm that allows for a social critique of
an entire system, such as family life or reservation life or plantation life. The char-
acters in these realistic microcosms experience some form of discrimination at
the hands of a dominant culture in which Euro-American adults appear to be set-
ting all social norms. The adolescent protagonists experience devastating conflicts
because of their race (or a skeletal structure that certainly serves as a metaphor
for “the Other”). A fantastic event happens in the world “as we know it,” and the
story is narrated from the perspective of an adolescent who experiences conflict
but who cannot fully reconcile him- or herself to the world in which s/he lives, so
the focalizer leaves space for readers to intuit either a political and/or a cultural
commentary about dominant cultural narratives in each novel.4 As Waller argues,
the inclusion of the fantastic in YA realism:

4. For more on magic realism, see Faris, who refers to the process of destabilizing narrative
focalization as “defocalization,” and she identifies it as a fundamental element of magic realism
 Chapter 5. Epistemology, ontology, and the philosophy of experientialism 119

offers a potentially … complex matrix of representational and ideological mean-

ing. Whereas teenage realism purports to portray teenagers and their lives as they
really are, fantastic realism has the potential to subvert the dominant discourses of
adolescence and offer an alternative set of ideological positions. (2009: 26, italics
in the original)

Thus, these protagonists’ ways of knowing their world shift because of their dis-
ruptive encounter with the fantastic, and all of these characters end the novel with
a different sense of their ontological status. They may have learned how to respond
to discrimination, but they cannot transcend it. Readers must determine both the
relationship between each story’s magic and its realism, but they are also left with
the stark reality that the ontology of otherness persists into adulthood, especially
in the case of 47 and The Absolutely True Diary (and similarly, Njunjul the Sun).
Social construction allows individuals to shift their status from being adolescents
who are discriminated against to adults better prepared to confront racism, but
race and racism remain constants in adulthood, as in adolescence.
It is specifically in this site of contestation, in this friction that forces the reader
to contemplate simultaneously both realism and the fantastic, that experientialist
philosophy empowers adolescent readers to think about the ontological and epis-
temological implications of race as a discursive construct. Amaryll Chanady ar-
gues that the fantastic emerged as a way for post-Enlightenment writers to critique
rationalism (1995: 132), and Rosenberg subsequently employs Perry Nodelman’s
concept of the child as other to define adults as the “rationalists” under critique in
literature for youth because adults are the agents who define the culture in which
children are raised (2001: 16–17). In other words, these novels force readers into a
consciousness that adults create discursive constructs: race and racism are cogni-
tive concepts, not unalterable reality or biological fact. Ultimately, by plunging the
reader into a collision between what can and cannot be, between what is and what
should be, these texts invite adolescent readers to question racism as a discursive
— and destructive — aetonormative conceptualization, informed by adult catego-
rizations that continually reinforce stereotypical cultural narratives.
What then is the relationship between philosophy and cognitive linguistics —
and why does this intersection matter to adolescent literature? On the most basic
level, cognitive linguistics teaches us that human development includes the ability
to categorize, conceptualize, and create metaphorical structures that have epis-
temological significance in childhood. Humans’ developmental ability to under-
stand metaphor begins early in childhood. Young adult novels are one mechanism
by which adolescents experience the conflation involved in embodied metaphors,

(Faris 2004: 43–59). For more on fantastic realism and the YA novel (including magic realism),
see Waller (2009).
120 Literary Conceptualizations of Growth

as David Almond’s multiple metaphorical uses of vision, birds, and death demon-
strate. Furthermore, adolescent literature also provides the opportunity for us to
analyze the epistemological implications of metaphorical networks on youth, es-
pecially as these networks create entailments that influence how children and ado-
lescents conceptualize cultural narratives, including the discursive construction of
race. As Lakoff and Turner observe, “[t]o study metaphor is to be confronted with
hidden aspects of one’s own mind and one’s own culture” (1989: 214).
Moreover, cognitive linguistics provides a middle ground between philosoph-
ical debates about empiricism and relativism. F. Elizabeth Hart (2001) writes about
this debate in terms that capture the philosophical tension as it bears on epistemol-
ogy. Empiricism, relying as it does on concepts of perception and scientific data,
tends to valorize the primacy of ontology in affirming being as the central goal of
knowledge. Relativism, on the other hand, relies so heavily on our understanding
of humanity as culturally constructed that epistemology — that is, knowing —
gains prominence in philosophy informed by relativism. Hart advocates a third
position, through cognitive linguistics, one that prioritizes experientialism. As she
demonstrates, Lakoff and Johnson argue that concepts form our experiences; that
is, what we know influences our being, and our being is influenced reciprocally
by how we know. Within linguistics, then, Lakoff and Johnson (1999) have tried
to mediate a “third position” (Hart 2001: 320–321), in which the ontology of the
rational human being co-creates the epistemology of the socially situated human
being.
We are philosophical animals. We are the only animals we know of who can ask,
and sometimes even explain, why things happen the way they do…. Philosophy
matters to us, therefore, primarily because it helps us to make sense of our lives
and to live better lives…. Since everything we think and say and do depends on
the workings of our embodied minds, cognitive science is one of our most pro-
found resources for self-knowledge. (Lakoff & Johnson 1999: 551)

As Lakoff and Johnson also observe, in order to be articulated, all philosophy de-
pends on metaphorical thinking: “The fact that abstract thought is mostly met-
aphorical means that answers to philosophical questions have always been, and
always will be, mostly metaphorical” (1999: 7).
Theirs is a recognition of the relationship between body and mind, between
conscious mind and unconscious brain function, and between language and per-
ception. This “third position,” as Hart calls it (2001: 320), seems to me crucial to
the study of adolescent literature because childhood and adolescence are, by defi-
nition, embodied states. Although earlier metaphysicists could afford to ignore
childhood as a time when humans are not yet fully rational, post-structural rela-
tivists have not necessarily been able to account for the newborn infant, born with
 Chapter 5. Epistemology, ontology, and the philosophy of experientialism 121

a distinct personality but not yet exposed in meaningful ways to social construc-
tion. (Anyone who has observed personality differences in identical twins within
moments of birth can testify to this phenomenon.)
Cognitive linguistics, however, provides a way to account for the child both as
embodied in infancy/childhood/adolescence, while simultaneously being shaped
conceptually by the ideological pressures of the world in which s/he grows. In
other words, post-structuralism does not always fully account for the biological
definition of infancy/childhood/adolescence; nor does essentialism or empiri-
cism fully account for the cultural factors that define how the individual is formed
by and matures as a result of social pressures. But in investigating how language
shapes our concepts, and how concepts, in turn, shape the human ability to con-
ceptualize, Lakoff and Johnson allow for the type of corporeal philosophy that
Elizabeth Grosz calls for in Volatile Bodies when she writes:
human bodies have irreducible neurophysiological and psychological dimensions
whose relations remain unknown and … human bodies have the wonderful abil-
ity, while striving for integration and cohesion, organic and psychic wholeness,
to also provide for and indeed produce fragmentations, fracturings, dislocations
that orient bodies and body parts toward other bodies and body parts. (1994: 13)

Cognitive linguistics thus allows for adolescent literature to integrate the study of
the body and the mind in ways that acknowledge human development, cognitive
development, and philosophical inquiry.
To underscore the relevance of cognitive linguistics to the philosophical ques-
tioning that inheres within adolescent literature, I cite one of Mina’s teachers, who
says, “our brains make stories naturally … they find it easy” (Almond 2010: 236).
In this passage, Almond openly acknowledges the cognitive function of storying.
The brain is hard-wired for storytelling, so brains find it “easy.” This teacher adds
“that stories weren’t really about words…. They were about visions. They were like
dreams” (237). Almond and Mosley and Alexie engage adolescents in stories that
include metaphysical and existential questions: What does it mean to be? What
does it mean to grow? What does it mean to think and to know? And most impor-
tant, how do we learn to enact the values that emerge from the socially constructed
epistemologies that have emerged, in part, from the stories we create and those
that we read? Such novels as these, then, help us understand the usefulness of ex-
perientialist philosophy to the study of maturation in adolescent literature.
 Chapter 6

The hegemony of growth

in adolescent literature

Cognitive science encompasses every aspect of the relationship between brain and
thought (both conscious and unconscious thought). Cognitive linguistics focuses
on the relationships between embodiment and categorization, including how lan-
guage usage, such as the employment of metaphor, influences our conceptualiza-
tions and how cognition and our lived experiences lead us to understand, create,
and remember scripts, blends, and cultural narratives. As I have mentioned, the
language of our conceptualizations frequently relies on metaphors that limit and
define how we think about certain concepts. How then do conceptualizations of
growth, including metaphors of growth, affect the academic study of adolescence?
What entailments and cultural narratives are attendant upon those metaphors of
growth? In what ways do our expectations that the young will and must grow influ-
ence how we study the literary and the historical construct of the adolescent? How
does the biological fact of growth create a metaphorical structure that defines, and
even limits, epistemological approaches to the study of adolescent literature?
In this chapter, I propose to investigate growth as a metaphorical concept that
has profoundly influenced the study of (child and) adolescent development, first
investigating various conceptual metaphors of growth and their implications as
represented by a range of philosophers and writers writing in western traditions. I
then move into an analysis of growth metaphors that are specific to the study of the
history of childhood and to the field of adolescent literature itself. I am intrigued
by the possibility that cognitive conceptualizations about childhood influence the
academic study of childhood in ways that epistemologically structure the field in
terms of growth. I thus explore metaphors of growth in both the study of child-
hood and adolescence as a way to examine the intellectual history of maturation
as a concept and to examine the relationship between maturational metaphors and
cognition. In this chapter, I argue that growth, as it is conceptualized, constrains
our thinking about childhood and adolescence so powerfully that growth can be
said to have an almost hegemonic presence in the field. This chapter thus serves
as an archaeological synthesis and meta-analysis of metaphors of growth in the
academic study of childhood and adolescence rather than in fiction written for
the young.
124 Literary Conceptualizations of Growth

Growth: The archaeology of a metaphor

The word “growth” has many meanings because so many things grow, evolve, or
develop, but I focus in this conceptual archaeology, as I have throughout this book,
on those instances in which “growth” refers to maturation, rather than the fre-
quent use of “growth” as a synonym for the word “to become.” I rely on Foucault’s
term “archaeology” in the sense of its interrogation of metadiscourse:
Archaeology tries to define not the thoughts, representations, images, themes,
preoccupations that are concealed or revealed in discourses; but those discourses
themselves, those discourses as practices obeying certain rules…. [I]ts problem is
to define discourses in their specificity…. It defines types of rules for discursive
practices that run through individual oeuvres. (1994: 138–139)
In other words, as I investigate how metaphors of growth influence scholarly con-
ceptualizations of adolescence and adolescent literature, I am focusing more on
Wordsworth’s concept of the child being father to the man than on the night grow-
ing dark or the economy growing stronger.
If metaphors are a means by which we compare two things, conceptual
metaphors are those in which we use two concepts in the comparison (Lakoff &
Johnson 1980: 3–4). Lakoff and Johnson provide three loose categories of concep-
tual metaphor that prove helpful in the analysis of how scholars employ metaphors
of growth. One category of conceptual metaphor, according to Lakoff and Johnson,
is the “orientational metaphor,” which are those metaphors that rely on concepts
of spatial orientation to make a comparison (1980: 14). Thus, when we refer to
a child or teenager as “growing up,” we are organizing our knowledge about the
many changes the child has undergone entirely around the spatial change of the
child growing physically taller — that is, vertically upwards. As I’ve previously dis-
cussed, since the metaphor UP IS GOOD entails an upwards orientation as positive,
the metaphor of “growing up” blends two concepts: psychological maturation is
occurring, and upwards directionality is positive. Growth, then, often carries with
it the connotation — that is, the entailment — that maturation is positive.
The emotional and cognitive changes that maturation involves also lend
themselves to the second type of conceptual metaphor, which Lakoff and Johnson
call “structural metaphors”; that is, they “allow us, in addition, to use one highly
structured and clearly delineated concept to structure another” (1980: 61). Lakoff
and Johnson offer the following examples as common structural metaphors em-
ployed in English: “LABOR IS A RESOURCE” and “TIME IS A RESOURCE” (68). In
other words, “don’t waste time” is a metaphor shaped by the concept that time is a
resource that can be wasted.
The third category of conceptual metaphor, the “ontological metaphor,” is the
human tendency to categorize “things [that] are not discrete or bounded … e.g.,
 Chapter 6. The hegemony of growth in adolescent literature 125

mountains, street corners, hedges, etc.” (Lakoff & Johnson 1980: 25). Ontological
metaphors involve our cognitive habit of “viewing events, activities, emotions,
ideas, etc., as entities and substances” (25). Lakoff and Johnson provide two ex-
amples: INFLATION IS AN ENTITY and THE MIND IS A MACHINE (26–27). Lakoff and
Johnson acknowledge that the three categories of conceptual metaphor — the ori-
entational, the ontological, and the structural — are overlapping categories. When
ontological and structural metaphors overlap, I follow Lakoff and Johnson’s lead
in identifying that metaphor as part of the larger group of conceptual metaphors:
structural metaphors.
In the following section, I will investigate various ways that growth has histor-
ically been treated conceptually, including such structural metaphors as GROWTH
IS INEVITABLE and GROWTH IS THE CHANGE FROM INNOCENCE TO WISDOM and
GROWTH IS PHASED. Such concepts as “inevitability” and “learning” and “phases”
themselves represent structured concepts, so when we compare growth to these
concepts, we are relying on conceptual metaphors that are structural.
Because categorization is fundamental to conceptualization, I will examine
in the next section how many thinkers have conceptualized growth within cer-
tain categories. My examination includes philosophers and poets, theologians
and novelists. Although the works of the specific thinkers I include here span a
historical trail that is 2500 years long, my intention in what follows is not to im-
ply that these specific philosophers and writers that I quote have somehow fol-
lowed a linear trajectory of intellectual growth by which they have influenced each
other. Robert Nisbet thoroughly traces the metaphor of growth as it has led to
interpretations of history as either linear or cyclical, “in a long succession of phi-
losophers, historians, and social scientists in the West: among them Heraclitus,
Aristotle, Polybius, Lucretius, Seneca, Florus, St. Cyprian, St. Augustine, Francis
Bacon, Pascal, Fontenelle, Turgot, Hume, Condorcet, Hegel, Compte, Spencer, and
… giving company to Spengler and his theory of cycles, such otherwise dissimi-
lar figures as Toynbee, Berdyaev, Reinhold Niebuhr, Sorokin, and the late Robert
H. Lowie” (1970: 19–20). I refer readers seeking a complete historiography of the
metaphor of growth to Nisbet’s work, since I am not arguing that these writers’
and philosophers’ ideas are an outgrowth of one another’s works.
On the contrary, since my goal throughout this book has been to interrogate
the connotation of growth as a metaphor for positive change (as words such as “de-
velopment” and “evolution” may connote), I present various texts in chronological
order only to demonstrate the myriad ways that growth has been conceptualized
within certain categories over time. Although I have chosen in the following section
to present the work of thinkers who are well-known for their metaphors of growth,
innumerable others could have been included here. Those which I have included,
however, demonstrate the point that metaphors for growth exist in three dominant
126 Literary Conceptualizations of Growth

categories, as Lakoff and Johnson (1999) would categorize conceptual metaphors:

embodied concepts of growth, epistemological concepts of growth, and ontologi-
cal concepts of growth. While some metaphors of growth evoke less predominant
strains of conceptual thinking, such as those that involve economic or phenomeno-
logical terms, the major categories do tend to overlap since, for example, all phe-
nomenological and cognitive experiences reside within embodiment. Nonetheless,
metaphors of growth have epistemological implications for the ways that we know
— or think about — growth. When we consider growth as a concept that is biophys-
ical or epistemological or ontological, for example, we tend to limit (or entail) how
we are thinking about childhood to a narrower privileging of only one aspect of hu-
man growth, such as only physical growth or cognitive growth or ontological status.

Growth and its historical conceptualizations

Classical literature provides more than one example in which a conceptual meta-
phor of physical or biological growth has led to mapping growth ontologically,
as a condition of being human. For example, in Generation of Animals, Aristotle
explores sexual reproduction — specifically, the function of semen. Aristotle pro-
vides a schema for different ways that a new thing can be generated: “it is one thing
when we say that night comes from day or a man becomes man from boy, meaning
that A follows B; it is another if we say that … the whole is formed from something
preexisting which is only put into shape,” as when a bed is made out of wood or a
sculpture is made from bronze (Aristotle 2012: Book I, Part 18). He believes the
third type of generation involves “contraries aris[ing] from contraries,” as when
“a man becomes unmusical from being musical, sick from being well” (Book I,
Part 18). The fourth type of generation he classifies as being “the efficient cause,”
that is the “moving principle” in which what emerges has been contained all along
within the original (Book I, Part 18). Aristotle then draws this conclusion: “either
the semen is the material from which [the offspring] is made, or it is the first effi-
cient cause. For assuredly it is not in the sense of A being after B”; that is, assuredly
semen does not create offspring in the way that a man grows naturally and logical-
ly from a boy (Book I, Part 18). Whatever we want to conclude about the scientific
accuracy or inaccuracy of Aristotle’s thoughts about semen, his dismissal of “A be-
ing after B,” just as “a man becomes man from boy,” demonstrates something about
his understanding of growth. He uses the structural metaphor of growth from boy
to man to demonstrate growth in linear terms of inevitability: growth happens no
matter what (as long as the child remains alive). Thus, in Aristotle’s conceptualiza-
tion, growth is an ontological reality in the sense that children are inevitably being
in a state of growth. In childhood, growth is inevitable.
 Chapter 6. The hegemony of growth in adolescent literature 127

Ovid, too, uses inevitability as a metaphor of growth that has ontological im-
plications when he explains how Jason reaps soldiers from dragon’s teeth that have
been sowed in a fertile field: “And as the infant receives the human form in the
womb of the mother, and is there formed in all its parts, and comes not forth
into the common air until at maturity, so when the figure of man is ripened in
the bowels of the pregnant earth, it arises in the fruitful plain” (Ovid 2012: Book
VII, Fable 1). Like Aristotle, Ovid depicts growth as an aspect of childhood that
inherently and inevitably affects the living child’s state of being. The premise of
Ovid’s work in The Metamorphoses indicates his interest in changing states, but
his conceptualization of metamorphosis itself is one of neutral value: that is, the
change involved in metamorphosis does not necessarily mark either an improving
or a declining condition. Ovid overtly describes his intention in his own words in
“The Argument” as being “to speak of forms changed into new bodies” (Book I).
Thus, not all metamorphoses involve improvement because not all change repre-
sents growth (although all growth involves change). Nevertheless, Ovid relies on
the same basic metaphor that Aristotle does: the child grows inevitably into a more
mature form, changing as s/he does so, but Ovid complicates the understanding of
growth by insisting that the ontological status entailed in the growth of the young
inevitability involves change. In this regard, Ovid employs metaphors that Lakoff
and Turner might perhaps identify as common in literature, since they list among
their evaluation of commonly recurring literary metaphors the following: “TIME
IS A CHANGER” (Lakoff & Turner 1989: 40). They also contrast the idea of “TIME
IS A CHANGER” with the idea that time is a motion or a personified stalker: “TIME
MOVES” and “TIME IS A PURSUER” (44, 46). In other words, the inevitability of
growth is a literary metaphor that has existed since the days of Aristotle and Ovid.
About five decades later than Ovid, also writing in Greek, Paul penned the
famous metaphor of growth that is found in I Corinthians of the Christian Bible’s
New Testament: “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child,
I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For
now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but
then I shall know even as also I am known” (13:11–12).1 Paul’s structural meta-
phor for growth involves some of the same sense of inevitability as Aristotle’s and
Ovid’s but it adds an additional and more epistemological concept: growth in-
volves the movement from knowing little to knowing more and in wiser ways.
In Paul’s words, “childish things” entail speaking, understanding, and thinking
in less mature ways than adults do — and Paul also relies on the analogy between

1. I rely on the King James Version (KJV) here not because it is the most definitive translation
from the Greek but because it is the version that has had the most influence on literature written
in English.
128 Literary Conceptualizations of Growth

childhood and adulthood to explain what will happen when he experiences spiri-
tual perfection, presumably either in death or following the apocalypse. He knows
now only “in part,” but “when that which is perfect is come,” he will experience full
and complete knowledge (I Corinthians 13:10). The spiritual implications of this
passage have little relevance to the exploration of growth as a metaphor. Rather,
Paul’s assertion that incomplete knowledge is the provenance of childhood and
wisdom the provenance of adulthood creates a structural metaphor in a different
category: growth entails learning and epistemological development. The corollary
creates yet another commentary on childhood: that childhood involves ignorance.
For Paul, then, growth is overcoming ignorance by learning. This metaphor is ef-
fectively an epistemological one.
Ptolemy divides growth into the seven stages of man. He believes that each
stage is dominated by an astronomical entity, with the moon responsible for the
“quick growth and moist nature” of infancy, with Mercury governing “the intel-
ligent and logical” cognitive faculties of the learning child from four years-old to
fourteen, with Venus ruling the romantic passions from puberty to adulthood,
with young manhood dominated by the Sun, which “implants in the soul at length
the mastery and direction of its actions, desire for substance, glory, and position,
a change from playful, ingenuous error to seriousness, decorum, and ambition”
(cited in Eyben 1993: 34, 35). Ptolemy includes emotion — even passion — along
with cognition in youth’s development into a young adult. But if a primary goal
of maturation also includes a “desire for substance, glory, and position,” then eco-
nomic responsibility serves as another marker of growth. The young man is he
who begins to accept financial independence as an indicator of separation from
his parents and who gainfully employs himself. (Women, apparently, need not
concern themselves with the seven ages of man.) All irony aside, growth is — for
both genders — a matter of increased economic productivity.
Shakespeare borrows Ptolemy’s seven ages of man, emphasizing growth as an
ontological process of becoming that is structured into phases. In As You Like It,
Jacques utters his famous soliloquy that begins:
All the world’s a stage …
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms.
Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. (Shakespeare 1974: II.vii: 139–149)
 Chapter 6. The hegemony of growth in adolescent literature 129

In this passage, several conceptual metaphors intertwine. At the most basic

level, humans are metaphorically compared to actors in Jacques’ soliloquy, but
more important for my purposes here, infants are depicted entirely in embod-
ied, visceral terms, as mewling and puking, while children are depicted in epis-
temological terms, as boys invested in learning and knowing. (This specific line
in Shakespeare’s play corresponds to the sense of growth depicted by Paul and
Ptolemy, that growth involves learning.) Once biophysically mature enough to
grow a beard, however, young men are depicted entirely in terms of emotions,
invoking Ptolemy’s recognition that growth involves changing emotions. Perhaps
the most bleak line of Shakespeare’s extended metaphor is his acknowledging that
growth leads inevitably to death:
Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness, and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans every thing. (1974: III.2: 163–166)

Man is, in effect, Being-towards-death. But before dying, man will experience the
second childhood of “oblivion” — that is, a return to an innocent state of un-
knowingness. Even though Shakespeare relies on a circular metaphor to evoke the
return in old age to speechlessness and blindness, the metaphor is still effectively
linear or perhaps a spiral. Growth moves in one direction only: people grow in-
evitably older and move towards their own deaths. Thus, Shakespeare relies on
multiple metaphors about growth, including the following: that growth is embod-
ied by phases; growth is ontologically inevitable and unidirectional — and it leads
to death, which is both an embodied reality and an ontological status. Lakoff and
Turner would identify the following basic metaphors at work here: “STATES ARE
LOCATIONS,” “DEATH IS A FINAL DESTINATION,” “DEATH IS NIGHT,” “CHANGE OF
STATE IS CHANGE OF LOCATION,” and “LIFE IS A PLAY” (1989: 7–8, 20).2
In the seventeenth-century, while attempting to disprove the theory that hu-
mans are born with an innate understanding of certain ideas or principles, John
Locke (1690) argued that the adult who:
attentively considers the state of a child at his first coming into the world, will
have little reason to think him stored with plenty of ideas, that are to be the mat-
ter of his future knowledge. It is by degrees he comes to be furnished with them:
and though the ideas of obvious and familiar qualities imprint themselves before
the memory begins to keep a register of time or order, yet it is often so late before
some unusual qualities come in the way, that there are few men that cannot recol-
lect the beginning of their acquaintance with them. (Locke 1836: 52)

2. See also Lakoff and Turner (1989: 21–22).

130 Literary Conceptualizations of Growth

In other words, growth involves shifting one’s epistemology through learning;

and growth involves memory, since long-term learning does not occur without
memory. This makes growth an accretive process. Moreover, growth depends on
experience: “if a child were kept in a place where he never saw any other but black
and white, till he were a man, he would have no more ideas of scarlet or green, than
he that from his childhood never tasted an oyster, or a pineapple, has of those par-
ticular relishes” (52–53). Locke argues by analogy throughout the essay, but one of
his most frequent comparisons involves comparing the adult, who has knowledge,
with the child, who has less. The chief metaphor attributed to Locke in this essay,
that of the tabula rasa, never explicitly appears in the essay, although his concep-
tualization of the child as a person with a mind that is trainable because it is empty
or devoid of fact portrays the child’s mind as an empty container and growth as
the process of filling that container. Locke’s embodied metaphors conceptualize
growth almost entirely in terms of epistemological development, but he contrib-
utes to this archaeology the structural conceptualization that growth is accretive.
Rousseau (1762) opens Emile with a metaphor comparing the growth of a
child to the growth of a tree: the uneducated man would have nature stifled within
him, “like a sapling chance sown in the midst of the highway, bent hither and
thither and soon crushed by the passers-by” (2012: Book I). Rousseau continues
to compare the growth of a child to the growth of a tree using growth as the source
domain and education as the target domain:
Plants are fashioned by cultivation, man by education. If a man were born tall and
strong, his size and strength would be of no good to him till he had learnt to use
them; they would even harm him by preventing others from coming to his aid; left
to himself he would die of want before he knew his needs. We lament the helpless-
ness of infancy; we fail to perceive that the race would have perished had not man
begun by being a child….
We are born weak, we need strength; helpless, we need aid; foolish, we need
reason. All that we lack at birth, all that we need when we come to man’s estate, is
the gift of education. (2012: Book I)

Rousseau understands that growth involves embodied change, but he uses educa-
tion as his most extensive metaphor for growth, complicating Locke’s comparison
of growth to the acquisition of knowledge. In Rousseau’s economy, three external
forces teach the child because “education comes to us from nature, from men, or
from things. The inner growth of our organs and faculties is the education of na-
ture, the use we learn to make of this growth is the education of men, what we gain
by our experience of our surroundings is the education of things” (2012: Book I). If
human growth requires education, then humans are also dependent on more than
their own brains to grow. Growth is dependent not only on embodied experiences
 Chapter 6. The hegemony of growth in adolescent literature 131

(“nature”) and our phenomenological perception of the world (“things”), growth is

also dependent on others (“men”). Rousseau’s identification of the relationship be-
tween perception and growth provides an alternative explanation for growth: it is
phenomenological. In Rousseau’s work the source domain and the target domain
shift almost commutatively: growth is education, but perhaps more important,
education is growth. Rousseau’s metaphors thus combine the epistemological,
the phenomenological, and the embodied to create another type of metaphor for
growth: the phenomenological.
Influenced by Rousseau’s injunction to “[a]ddress your treatises on education
to the women” because they control their children’s lives emotionally and intellec-
tually, Mary Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), in
which she extends the conceptual metaphor “education is growth” to girls as well
as boys (Rousseau 2012: Book I). Her chief concern resides in the way that girls are
trained only “to the desire of establishing themselves, the only way women can rise
in the world — by marriage” (Wollstonecraft 2002: Introduction). This education-
al failure, of course, leads women to be weak, since “strength of body and mind
are sacrificed to libertine notions of beauty” (2002: Introduction). Moreover, this
desire makes “mere animals of them, when they marry, they act as such children
may be expected to act” (2002: Chapter 1). Central to Wollstonecraft’s metaphor of
growth is the movement from weakness to strength, which she considers in both
biophysical terms and cognitive terms. As she writes, “[c]hildren, I grant, should
be innocent; but when the epithet is applied to men, or women, it is but a civil term
for weakness” (2002: Chapter 2). Thus, rather than extolling the cognitive virtues
of innocence, Wollstonecraft deplores it as a form of weakness:
Consequently, the most perfect education, in my opinion, is such an exercise of
the understanding as is best calculated to strengthen the body and form the heart;
or, in other words, to enable the individual to attain such habits of virtue as will
render it independent. In fact, it is a farce to call any being virtuous whose virtues
do not result from the exercise of its own reason. This was Rousseau’s opinion
respecting men: I extend it to women…. (2002: Chapter 2)

More than once, Wollstonecraft also uses childhood as a metaphor for women.
She even points out how irrational it is for men to repress women’s intellectual
growth by infantilizing them: “Men, indeed, appear to me to act in a very unphi-
losophical manner, when they try to secure the good conduct of women by at-
tempting to keep them always in a state of childhood” (2002: Chapter 2). Thus,
Wollstonecraft’s chain of conceptual metaphors follows the logic of a syllogism:
childhood is innocence; innocence is weak; childhood is weak; therefore, women
who act like children are also weak:
132 Literary Conceptualizations of Growth

And will moralists pretend to assert, that this is the condition in which one half of
the human race should be encouraged to remain with listless inactivity and stupid
acquiescence? Kind instructors! what were we created for? To remain, it may be
said, innocent; they mean in a state of childhood. (2002: Chapter 4)

Wollstonecraft describes growth as a movement from weakness to strength;

growth is a matter of becoming stronger in her dominant metaphor, although one
suspects that she cares more about cognitive strength than biological or physical
strength. In Wollstonecraft’s conceptualization, growth is getting stronger.
Written in 1802 but originally published as “Moods of My Own Mind, No. 4”
in the 1807 Poems in Two Volumes, Wordsworth’s frequently anthologized “My
Heart Leaps Up When I Behold a Rainbow in the Sky” contains his most famous
metaphor of growth: “The Child is Father of the Man” (1807: line 7). In this onto-
logical formulation, the man exists within the child, who will — as inevitably as
A follows B — transform eventually into an adult. But the child represents both
hope and joy to Wordsworth, so maturation involves a loss of these things. For
example, in “Michael” he claims that “a child, more than all other gifts … / Brings
hope with it, and forward-looking thoughts” (lines 146 and 148), while in his ode
“Intimations of Immortality” he writes that “ … the growing Boy … / Beholds
the light, and whence it flows, He sees it in his joy” (1807: lines 68, 70–71). If chil-
dren are born “trailing clouds of glory,” then growth involves “Shades of the pris-
on-house” that “begin to close / Upon the growing Boy” (1807: lines 64, 67–68);
“Full soon thy Soul shall have her earthly freight, / And custom lie upon thee
with a weight” (lines 127–128). If “[d]elight and liberty” are “the simple creed /
Of Childhood, whether busy or at rest, with new-fledged hope still fluttering in
his breast,” then growth involves an epistemological recognition of “our mortal
Nature” (lines 137–139, 147). Thus, Wordsworth exemplifies growth as both the
loss of innocence and as ontologically oriented towards death:
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind;
In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be;
In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffering;
In the faith that looks through death,
In years that bring the philosophic mind. (lines 180–187)

In Wordsworth’s metaphorical formulation, growth is loss: specifically, the loss of

innocence.
Wordsworth invokes a cultural narrative about growth as the loss of inno-
cence in writing about growth in ontological terms; other cultural narratives in the
 Chapter 6. The hegemony of growth in adolescent literature 133

nineteenth century emerge from Darwin, who relies on biological metaphors to

talk about evolution, and from Freud and his followers, for whom growth is large-
ly psychological and cognitive. But something of the ontology of innocent flesh
giving way to the corrupting pull of death’s inevitability resurfaces in the twen-
tieth century in Heidegger’s philosophy. His metaphors bear similarity to both
Shakespeare’s and Wordsworth’s ontological metaphors of growth. Heidegger
argues that we are all always already dying, which involves an understanding of
ourselves as Being-in-time; in other words, we live constantly aware of death as the
opposite of life. Maturation (and death) inhere within life itself:
When, for instance, a fruit is unripe, it “goes towards” its ripeness…. The fruit
brings itself to ripeness, and such a bringing of itself is a characteristic of its Being
as a fruit. Nothing imaginable … would eliminate the unripeness of the fruit,
if this entity did not come to ripen of its own accord. (2008: H243, italics in the
original)

All living things carry inherently within them, then, this unidirectional biological
tendency toward growth that leads inevitably to death and the cessation of growth.
According to Heidegger, growth is the path to death; growth is always already
Being-towards-death.

The implications of growth metaphors

While this summary of a few metaphors about growth demonstrates varying at-
titudes towards childhood and adolescence, perhaps more important are the
epistemological implications these conceptual metaphors create. Cognitive and
embodied models of growth have, in the past, tended to emphasize the Cartesian
split between body and mind, while ontological models tend to elide that split
because both body and mind inhere within one’s ontological status. Some of these
metaphors imply that growth is inevitable, while others imply that growth always
involves change, so we can conclude that conceptualizations of growth usually in-
volve biophysically embodied change, epistemological change, and/or ontological
change. Moreover, if growth inheres within all living things, and if all living things
inevitably change, the final act of mutability is death, which inheres genetically
within each living thing.
If those early phases of growth — for humans, infancy, childhood, and ado-
lescence — are only temporary stages in the inexorable march to mortality, how-
ever, then youth itself is ontologically temporary — a metaphor that might seem
sensible to some scholars of childhood studies, since children are only young for
a short while. But this metaphor might give us pause. For example, the temporary
134 Literary Conceptualizations of Growth

nature of childhood makes it an easy target for dismissal, as in such formulations

as “she’ll outgrow her immaturity” or “it’s just a phase.” Negative connotations
about the ontology of the childlike are made easier because that stage is “only”
temporary; childhood contrasts nicely in many metaphors with the putative fixity
of adulthood, when we are ostensibly “mature” and “stable.” Alternatively, those
metaphors of growth that focus more on the child’s epistemology than on her
or his ontological status imply not only that learning affects growth but also that
learning even effects growth. Children grow because they learn, or even only when
they learn. Whether the metaphor assumes childhood weakness and stupidity, as
Wollstonecraft implies, or innocence as Wordsworth does, this model of growth
values knowledge (or “innocence,” which is the lack thereof) more than any other
factor. Ultimately, various metaphors of growth imply that childhood and youth
are temporary, and children and adolescents must learn in a model that privileges
the learning mind over the biophysically evolving body.
What then are the wider implications for the way we think about childhood
and adolescence? When being young is linked to changing from a state of lack
of knowledge to an “evolved” state of knowledge, adulthood is privileged as the
“evolved” form of the human being, although admittedly, more Romantic con-
ceptualizations of the child as innocent have worked since the nineteenth century
to deconstruct this view and posit the child as superior to the adult. Either way,
however, a power imbalance occurs: one phase of life is marked superior to the
other. Because childhood is transitory and adulthood lasts for most people, it is
to be hoped, longer than childhood and youth, all metaphors of growth except
the Romantic ones imply a relationship between “growth” and “improvement” in
the experientialism of the embodied mind. Except for the Romantic viewpoint,
we experience growth as learning and being more than when we were young, so
our ability to conceptualize growth is entailed by the experiences of our embodied
reason.

A historiography of growth metaphors

A historian of childhood in medieval Germany, James A. Schultz, observes that

“[i]deas about childhood affect not only the way we treat children of the past: they
affect the way we write the history of childhood” (1995: 2). The conceptual meta-
phors of growth that historians employ, like those of philosophers and poets, thus
have long-term implications for the study of youth. For example, those historians
who collapse metaphors of the child growing into a metaphor of how a culture or
civilization grows tend to demonstrate epistemologies in which the child is de-
picted negatively, as powerless, immature, or unstable. Robert Nisbet identifies
 Chapter 6. The hegemony of growth in adolescent literature 135

metaphors of growth as the central historiographical metaphor in 2,500 years of

Euro-American history: “Of all metaphors in Western thought on mankind and
culture, the oldest, most powerful and encompassing is the metaphor of growth”
(1970: 19). Nisbet cites Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West to illustrate a
typical instantiation of this type of metaphor: “civilization (or mankind or society
or the nation, as the case may be) ‘passes through the age-phases of the individual
man. It has its childhood, youth, manhood, and old age’ ” (Spengler, cited in Nisbet
1970: 20). The comparisons to childhood and old age are not flattering, since his-
torians employing these metaphors tend to rely on “childhood” as a metaphor to
infantilize a culture and “old age” to mark its decline.
Ella S. Armitage demonstrates this infantilization of a historical era in The
Childhood of the English Nation; or, The Beginnings of English History. The opening
sentences state the metaphor boldly:
A Nation has a growth as truly as an individual and a nation’s history should be
the story of that growth, and not a mere chronicle of disjointed facts. And just as
the life of an individual receives its character to a large degree from the events of
its earliest years … so the key to the history of a nation must often be sought in
its earliest days….
The first step in every nation’s history is that by which it passes from barba-
rism to civilisation, from anarchy to organisation. (1885: 1)

Armitage depicts immaturity as a lack of “character,” and she has no doubt about
what has caused the greatest growth in the history of twelfth century England: “We
may roughly describe the most striking feature of the twelfth century by saying
that then people began to think” (219) — by which Armitage means, scholars and
philosophers began to develop new ideas, rather than handing down only the re-
ceived notions of the classical age. Armitage’s extended metaphor fits squarely into
the tradition of Locke’s and Rousseau’s metaphors for growth as epistemological:
the child England cannot grow until it learns — just like the individual human
child needs to learn — to think for itself.
Contemporary with Armitage’s work, Edward Clodd’s textbook, The
Childhood of the World: A Simple Account of Man’s Origin and Early History, relies
on the same metaphor. His history intends to teach children how “different races
have advanced from savagery to civilization” by tracing “the progress of man in
material things” and “his mode of advance from lower to higher stages of religious
belief ” (1887: vi). As he puts it, “The progress of the world from its past to its pres-
ent state is like the growth of each of us from childhood to manhood or woman-
hood,” even though we can learn from history that some civilizations eventually
have “decayed and died” (52). By invoking the “progress” of “material things” and
“higher stages of religious belief,” Clodd joins an economic model of growth with
136 Literary Conceptualizations of Growth

a spiritual (and racist and colonialist) one: youth is a state of material and religious
poverty. Moreover, Clodd implies that cultures grow like children do — but the
seeds of their own death lie within that very growth.
Even more remarkably, some fairly recent historians of childhood and youth
rely on the same metaphor, that civilization — and even the field of childhood
studies itself — grows, just as the young grow. In Growing Up with the Country,
Elliott West, for example, tells us that:
Thirty years ago, the literature in the field [of the history of childhood] was like a
child — small, but growing every day. Today, it is more like an adolescent — large
and gawky, full of promise, but also a little uncertain about its future. The study of
western children, however, cannot even be called infantile; it is at best embryonic.
(1989: xviii)

West is referencing as the field’s “embryonic” point of origin that most infamous
of childhood historians, Philippe Ariès — whose methodology has been scath-
ingly critiqued for its many flaws.3 In his 1960 L’Enfant et la view familiale sous
l’ancien règime, Ariès depicts as infantilized a culture he (erroneously) believed
did not recognize childhood. He asks the following questions, relying on a concep-
tual metaphor of childhood to compare the tenth century to the nineteenth: “How
did we come from that ignorance of childhood to the centring [sic] of the family
around the child in the nineteenth century? How far does this evolution corre-
spond to a parallel evolution of the concept people have of the family … ?” (Ariès
1962: 10). Later, he writes, “What a long way we have come to reach this point!” —
the point in question being the establishment of childhood as a time of purity and
innocence (108). Ariès’ reliance on orientational metaphors of distance — “how
far” and “what a long way” — coupled with structural metaphors such as “evolu-
tion” indicate his interpretation of the Middle Ages as immature. That depiction
belittles both the era and the subject under scrutiny: childhood.
More than any other historian, in Growing Up in Medieval London, Barbara
Hanawalt criticizes Ariès for the paucity of evidence on which he made his sweep-
ing claims. She is scrupulous in avoiding metaphors that depict the Medieval era as
the “Dark Ages,” which she demonstrates as the metaphorical “foil” by which Ariès
and his followers, such as Lawrence Stone, make “our own times look good by com-
parison” (1993: 6). In other words, Hanawalt recognizes that Ariès’ depiction of
the Middle Ages as immature is a failure of metaphor. Nonetheless, Hanawalt finds
herself falling prey to the same easy tendency to use words that depict historical

3. See Stone (1974: 28); Wilson (1980: 147); Pollock (1983: 263); Hanawalt (1993: 7–10); Schultz
(1995: 2). Schultz even metaphorizes Ariès himself, turning the historian into a father who has
suppressed the growth of an entire discipline: “Thus it is that the ‘Father of Family History’ has
stunted the growth of his child” (Schultz 1995: 9).
 Chapter 6. The hegemony of growth in adolescent literature 137

phenomena as having biophysical properties of growth: in medieval London, “one

can argue for a growing concern about children and adolescents” (6, italics added);
our legal institutions “grew out of that past” (9, italics added). Social structures
“evolved” (107) and “the very apparent preoccupation of books of advice, city or-
dinances, royal decrees, and even the language of court cases indicates a growing
preoccupation with potential problems” of adolescence in medieval London (110,
italics added). Did this preoccupation really indicate an increasing concern with
the problems of youth, or did it indicate an increase in literacy and the subsequent
crafting of laws that were recorded in history? In any event, Hanawalt cannot avoid
using a metaphor of growth to imply that increasing attention to growing youth
demonstrates a positive thing: London’s “lively neighborhood concern for the
welfare of children” (56). In Hanawalt’s metaphor, growth is awareness — even
though, in the absence of written records, she cannot really prove that medieval
London was unaware of the problems of childhood and adolescence.
It is not unusual for historians to write about growth in terms of upward
trajectories of growth or downward trajectories of devolution. Those — such as
Armitage and Clodd and West — who write about history in terms of “develop-
ment” or “evolution” from an immature civilization to a more mature one rely on
scripted metaphors of growth as positive, while those concerned about decline
tend focus more on the later stages of growth that invoke scripts of dissolution
and death. As the title alone indicates, C. John Sommerville’s The Rise and Fall of
Childhood falls into this latter pattern:
For the past 400 years children have enjoyed or endured increasing adult atten-
tion. That is largely because we have become more and more preoccupied with the
future…. But something is happening that might change all this. After hundreds
of years of economic expansion, the West now faces the possibility of long-term
economic decline. All of our economic and social problems are made worse by
any rise in population and by the need to sacrifice for the welfare of our children
and future generations. So it is possible that we are at a turning point in the history
of childhood, and that things are turning down. (1982: 9)

Given current economic conditions, Sommerville’s concern in the 1980s with the
global economy seem prescient, but he nonetheless couples his history of child-
hood with notions of social maturation and eventual decay that are reminiscent of
Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and Heidegger.
Historians’ ability to conceptualize historical change is entailed by the meta-
phors of growth on which they rely. Whether historians view “growth” as positive
or negative, they position childhood within very specific conceptualizations, too.
These conceptualizations of childhood have less to do with embodiment than they
do with epistemology and ontology. In the formulations I have cited, childhood is
138 Literary Conceptualizations of Growth

either a time of ignorance that affects a status of negative social conditions, or it is

a time of purity and innocence that precedes a decline into corruption. Either way,
the ability to think about historical change is entailed by the concept of growth.

Growth and the historiography of literature for youth

Growth is also a prominent metaphor within the study of children’s and adolescent
literature, and the ways that literary critics use the term undoubtedly influences
perceptions of childhood and adolescence within the field. As Seth Lerer writes in
his recent history of children’s literature, “Perhaps we never can escape the evolu-
tionary metaphors that govern our literary and life histories” (2008: 173). He thus
implies that growth is inescapable in our “literary histories” and “life histories”
— but he does not seem to recognize that he is using the exact same metaphor to
describe the history of children’s literature. Peter Hunt also employs this metaphor
in his history of children’s literature, An Introduction to Children’s Literature. Hunt
writes about children’s books during the era of 1860–1920, “In a sense, children’s
literature was growing up — growing away from adults” (1994: 59). Karín Lesnik-
Oberstein takes a more pragmatic approach to the matter when she traces how
the field emerged historically from educational goals; because of this history, she
notes, some critics “ascribe powerful educational and developmental functions
to a child’s reading” in the ways they perceive children’s books as both helping
children learn about the world and “strengthening” their minds (1994: 3). Is it in-
evitable that scholars tracing the history of literature written for an audience of
humans-who-are-growing will employ metaphors of growth?
Literary historian Hayden White would argue “no” — that there are actually
four models of literary narrative that correspond loosely with Northrop Frye’s
Jungian analysis of genre. White describes the emplotment of history as the process
whereby historians (and/or literary critics) transform historical fact into subjec-
tive narrative, and he identifies four patterns of emplotment: those scholars who
write about the past using metaphors of pilgrimage; those who employ metaphors
of evolution and growth; those who trace downward spirals or devolution (such
as Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire), and those who analyze
history ironically, as bound to repeat itself in repetitive cycles.4 White does not
recognize the cognitive basis for these emplotments; instead, he identifies their
existence solely as a function of textuality. White writes:

4. See White (1978: 12, 82–83).

 Chapter 6. The hegemony of growth in adolescent literature 139

[H]istorical narratives are not only models of past events and processes, but also
metaphorical statements which suggest a relation of similitude between such
events and processes and the story types that we conventionally use to endow the
events of our lives with culturally sanctioned meanings. Viewed in a purely formal
way, a historical narrative is not only a reproduction of the events reported in it,
but also a complex of symbols which gives us directions for finding an icon of the
structure of those events in our literary tradition. (1978: 88)

Cognitive literary theory, however, allows us to recognize that White’s term “em-
plotment” is a matter of script. That is, a scholar’s internalized cognitive concep-
tualization of such scripts as evolution or devolution influences in turn how s/he
conceptualizes literary history.
In this section, I would like to explore the metaphorical emplotments (that
is, the scripts) that occur when literary critics write about historical changes in
children’s literature. I examine the way the following texts employ scripted con-
ceptualizations of growth: Seth Lerer’s Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History
from Aesop to Harry Potter (2008), Beverly Lyon Clark’s Kiddie Lit: The Cultural
Construction of Children’s Literature in America (2003), and Kimberley Reynolds’
Radical Children’s Literature: Future Visions and Aesthetic Transformations in
Juvenile Fiction (2007). These books do not all share the same patterns of script-
ed emplotment, which demonstrates that our field is developing multiple strate-
gies for self-analysis and explanation — surely one mark of the field’s increasing
complexity. In effect, I am analyzing these texts historiographically, for to study
historiography is to study the history of historical study itself. Two noted histo-
rians, Conal Furay and Michael J. Salevouris, define historiography as “the study
of the way history has been and is written — the history of historical writing….
When you study ‘historiography’ you do not study the events of the past directly,
but the changing interpretations of those events in the works of individual his-
torians” (1988: 223). My hope is to demonstrate historiographical diversification
in our field by examining three things: 1) these sample texts’ scripted emplot-
ments, 2) their contribution to the ideologies surrounding the cultural narratives
of children’s and adolescent literature, and 3) their methodologies. In writing a
brief historiography of growth in our field, I hope to perform the type of analy-
sis that demonstrates how we can utilize cognitive narratology to theorize about
historicism in productive ways that enrich both our scholarship and our profes-
sion. While we are sometimes governed almost blindly by our use of metaphors of
growth and development when we write about the history of children’s literature,
I find it significant that we are not always so.
I begin with Seth Lerer’s Children’s Literature because it chronicles the lon-
gest span of history of those I’m investigating. Lerer demonstrates how Greek and
Roman children’s education was guided by texts written for and adapted to the
140 Literary Conceptualizations of Growth

use of children, tracing how the memorization and recitation considered central
to education in both cultures required the existence of texts with which children
could engage. Lerer notes the significance of social class in driving the educational
ideologies of these cultures, and he focuses with exquisite care on Aesop’s Fables
and its many adaptations in later cultures. Lerer is at his strongest in tracing the
genealogies involved in adaptation. For example, he notes the long-lasting hold
Robinson Crusoe has had on the Anglophone imagination, even tracing vestiges
of Crusoe in Winnie-the-Pooh’s “expotition” to the north pole and his finding of
footsteps — not Friday’s, but his own — when he is tracking woozles. Lerer also
analyzes the influences of Locke and Darwin, especially noting the impact of the
latter on the colonialist literature of the British Empire.
Lerer makes clear that one of his ideological goals in writing this book is to
contribute to a cultural narrative that favors preserving the book as artifact. He
writes, “I argue for the continuance of books in an age marked by visual technol-
ogy” (2008: 16). He also claims as his ideology the following: “children’s literature
is not some ideal category that a certain age may reach and that another may
miss. It is instead a kind of system, one whose social and aesthetic value is deter-
mined out of the relationships among those who make, market and read books”
(7, italics added). But rather than adhering to the class-conscious ideology this
proclamation implies, Lerer instead constructs a Romantic child. Lurking around
every corner in his book is an innocent and educable middle-class white child
with easy access to literacy — not unlike his own son, whose reading he frequently
describes.
If Lerer’s ideology is ultimately Romantic, then it should follow as no sur-
prise that the forms of emplotment he most frequently employs are those of
the journey and of growth. He is given to using phrases like “Puritanism was a
movement for the future” (81), and “Books, like Americans, are children” (96),
and “Evolution, like imagination, lets us see how things turn into other things”
(186), and “Childhood and freshman year are periods of change” (208), and “The
legacy of fairy-tale philology lies in the ways in which we may imagine … per-
sonal growth and linguistic change” (223), and “It is a cliché to aver that the First
World War ended the childhood of the Edwardian era” (263). The rhetoric in all
of these phrases includes metaphors of growth, movement, or change, so dis-
cerning readers can conclude that Lerer posits the history of children’s literature
as an evolutionary model and childhood as a matter of purity, innocence, and
goodness.
Beverly Lyon Clark’s Kiddie Lit, however, takes an almost diametrically op-
posed approach to emplotment. In Clark’s model, America was once almost idyllic
in “how highly the nineteenth-century elite regarded” children’s literature, “com-
pared to the twentieth-century elite” (2003: xii). Clark problematizes the tendency
 Chapter 6. The hegemony of growth in adolescent literature 141

among scholars of cultural studies to view childhood as a “stepping-stone” to

adulthood (10). She notes the particularly prominent tendency among white mid-
dle-class scholars to view childhood as something that is only a stage, something
that will be left behind, and that is, therefore, unproblematic in its construction
(10–12). She particularly excoriates stage theorists, whose rhetoric encourages the
disparagement of “what we consider childish” (11); they are “pernicious because of
the way they are inherently dismissive of childhood, the way they image childhood
as something other than the ideal, something that needs to be grown out of ” (11).
She cites Jacqueline Rose to note that the “journey metaphor” of children being
“on their way” to adulthood is a common one (Rose, cited in Clark 2003: 12). She
asks what would happen if we thought of every life stage as equally valuable? “How
impossible would it be for educators — whose very goal is change — … to rei-
magine stages and development?” (Clark 2003: 12). Thus, Clark resists the pattern
of both evolution and the journey in her historical study of children’s literature
within the context of the American literary canon.
Curiously, however, the emplotment pattern that Clark occasionally reflects is
one of devolution. Her basic premise — that children’s literature was more respect-
ed by literary critics in the nineteenth-century than in subsequent centuries — is
one of devolution, of downward mobility, of a fall from the garden of Eden, if you
will. She tracks the “critical trajectories” (16) of such authors as Frances Hodgson
Burnett and Henry James, to demonstrate James’ ascension to literary heights and
Burnett’s descension to the depths, noting that James himself uses disparagingly
such terms as “ ‘puerile,’ ‘infantine,’ and ‘jejune’ to disparage” (35). She notes that
various academics write about Hawthorne’s work for children “dismissively” and
“[reduce]” children’s literature to only a few notable authors (65). She examines
how New Critics in the mid-twentieth century distinguished The Adventures of
Tom Sawyer as a book for children to elevate Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as
a literary book — in the process, causing Tom Sawyer to fall from grace — and
the canon. She investigates how Alcott’s various genres “bled into each other”; in
the twentieth century, her books for children were removed with almost surgical
precision from the canon so that she became virtually unstudied for much of the
twentieth century. According to Clark, L. Frank Baum’s reputation suffers because
he wrote for a profit — and he wrote at a time “when children’s literature was in-
creasingly divorced from that for adults and had become, by definition, non-elite”
(139). Only the MGM movie, she believes, revived The Wizard of Oz from the
“critical black hole” into which it had “slipped” (147). Although Clark acknowl-
edges that the “dismissiveness, condescension, and marginalization” of children’s
authors is now less prevalent than it once was, hers is still an emplotted trajec-
tory of prelapsarian children’s literature having fallen in disgrace from the literary
heavens (125).
142 Literary Conceptualizations of Growth

Clark’s methodology focuses as closely on language and discourse as Lerer’s

does, but she takes an approach that is less philological and more archival. Clark
examines the critical reviews and cultural reactions to a text more frequently than
she analyzes the text itself. The combination of Clark’s methodology and the em-
plotment of her narrative approach to children’s literature reveals her ideology
towards texts written for children. She believes that the genre is not best sepa-
rated from texts written for older people; she believes the genre is best studied in
the context of its cultural reception and therefore its cultural construction. Her
ideological intent is a revisionary one: she wants to reclaim childhood and the
literature of childhood as valuable life stages, worthy in their own right as the
object of study. Her ability to combine her respect for childhood with her intellec-
tual passion emerges as she quotes Walt Disney in the final sentence of Kiddie Lit:
“What the hell’s wrong with something being childish?” (Disney, cited in Clark
2003: 183). Ideologically, Clark bases her claim for the study of children’s literature
on her refusal to denigrate childhood as a life stage. The implication resounds with
import for other aspects of childhood studies: she is one of many scholars whose
literary criticism argues in favor of a cultural narrative of increased societal respect
for childhood.
Kimberley Reynolds shares the same goal in Radical Children’s Literature:
Future Visions and Aesthetic Transformations in Juvenile Fiction. Reynolds’ goal
is to “map the way that children’s literature contributes to the social and aesthetic
transformation of culture by, for instance, encouraging readers to approach ideas,
issues, and objects from new perspectives and so prepare the way for change”
(2007: 1). She believes that children’s literature occupies a “paradoxical cultural
space” in being “simultaneously highly regulated and overlooked, orthodox and
radical, didactic and subversive” (3).
Relying on work from a broad range of scholars, including Juliet Dusinberre,
Betty Greenway, Judith Plotz, Claudia Nelson, Julia Mickenberg, and Humphrey
Carpenter, Reynolds demonstrates how influential childhood reading was histori-
cally to the shaping of Modernism. Given that much of her project is dedicated
to refuting Jacqueline Rose’s claim that children’s literature rejects Modernism,
Reynold’s scholarship is convincing. Indeed, whether she is writing about the way
that picture and text work together to create a medium first available in children’s
literature that subsequently opened the way to other literatures or whether she
is writing about nonsense or sexuality or self-harm, Reynolds’ typical methodol-
ogy is to move between scholarly studies and close textual readings to support
her clearly stated ideology: she wants to “[change] the way children’s literature is
perceived in culture by recognising the way books — and increasingly other nar-
rative forms — for children have fostered and embedded social, intellectual and
aesthetic changes” (23). Reynolds shares with Clark — and with other notable
 Chapter 6. The hegemony of growth in adolescent literature 143

recent literary historians who study children’s literature, like Mickenberg — an

ideology that seeks to change and improve the reputation of children’s literature,
both as texts and as a field of study. Reynolds notes:
Children’s literature is one way through which children and young people receive
stories about how the world works and ways of thinking about themselves and
the things they do. Texts such as these can provide new narrative strands that for
some will simply be interesting, but for others may offer alternative versions of the
stories they are telling themselves about themselves. (113)

Reynolds actually problematizes metaphors of growth in the study of childhood

when she writes about stage theorists (70) and when she writes about the literature
children are given:
A nursery is both a place for the young and a place of development; far from nec-
essarily languishing and becoming aesthetically inert when directed at a juvenile
audience … such genres are often refreshed and developed for use in new ways….
Just as we never leave childhood behind, so the narratives ingested in childhood
endure and shape adult thinking and behaviour at many levels. (19)

Rather than lapsing into some sort of child-is-father-of-the-man ideology,

Reynolds very matter of factly insists that memory keeps us from ever being either
the Romantic construction of the child or the construction of the child as some-
how separate from the child we once were. The result is a sophisticated conceptual
metaphor that acknowledges growth as both ontological and cognitive.
The root metaphor that most fascinates me in Reynolds’ work is her use of the
word “transformation,” which appears in her very title. Some of the key passages
from her work rely on this notion of children’s literature as having transforma-
tive or liberatory or evolutionary potential. For example, she writes: “Much of the
symbolic potential of childhood in culture derives from the fact that children have
most of their choices before them: they represent potential” (2) and “Because writ-
ing for the young has a future orientation, there is often a freshness and urgency
to the storylines of children’s fictions that correspond to the fact that their target
readers are generally encountering ideas and experiences for the first time” (3). She
writes about adolescence as a “trajectory,” and she notes that Ariès “is surely right
in recognising that the first stages in human development are not just biological
— not just about getting bigger and learning to function in society — they are also
cultural inventions and shaped according to society’s needs and sense of itself at
any given moment” (70). She concludes with an analysis of the influence electronic
media may be having on children’s literature: “ … while ideologically children’s
literature may be struggling to construct new visions of how society could func-
tion, aesthetic transformations are in process” (179), adding later that “a major
transformation of children’s literature itself is taking place in cyberspace” (180).
144 Literary Conceptualizations of Growth

In other words, Reynolds is able to identify the metaphor of childhood growth as

a positive historical projection while also still — as Clark does — problematizing
that metaphor as culturally grounded in societal needs to believe that children can
and will improve the future.
Reynolds and Clark do not espouse views of childhood that involve children
trailing clouds of glory who then devolve into adulthood or else evolve into some
higher being called “adults.” Although both of them rely on metaphors of growth
— and in Clark’s case, on an emplotment of devolution — both of them base their
analyses in notions of childhood as one stage of life that has as much usefulness
and meaning as any other stage of life. While it is difficult to avoid metaphors of
growth when writing about children, and while it can be difficult to avoid meta-
phors of evolution when writing about history and the passing of time, literary
critics in our field, such as Clark and Reynolds, have begun to grapple with the
problems created by basing models of childhood and models of history in meta-
phors of growth. These are not scholars who expect children to save the future for
adults, nor do they expect adults to save children from the horrors of adulthood.
Rather, they employ metaphors of growth about childhood in constructivist ways
that contribute to the recognition of children’s and adolescents’ texts as having
cultural pertinence, especially in the history of ideas and aesthetic changes over
time. If the scripts (or emplotment) vary between these two authors, the cultural
narratives they are advancing are not so very different in helping situate childhood
on a necessary spectrum of the life span.
Children’s literature criticism by Lerer, Clark, and Reynolds demonstrates that
the use of metaphors influences the unavoidable use of scripts in emplotment.
Those scripted emplotments, in turn, have ideological implications about how
youth as a stage of life is analyzed. When scholars like Clark and Reynolds investi-
gate and critique those metaphors in their histories, they demystify childhood and
adolescence and adulthood, demonstrating the significance of childhood studies
to all literary scholars.
Because it is such an emphasized aspect of the study of children’s and adoles-
cent fiction, I cannot help but wonder if growth has not come to occupy a privi-
leged narratological position in children’s literature (both its fiction and its literary
criticism) that is hegemonic. Thinkers throughout time have described metaphors
of growth in terms of the ontological, the epistemological, and the biophysically
embodied; historians and literary critics have tracked “progress” and “decline” in
terms of metaphors of growth that assume their readers understand both the bio-
logical and cognitive implications of human growth. Traditionally, many scholars
have relied on metaphors of growth to describe historical change; most of those
scholars imply something about the powerlessness of childhood when they em-
ploy those metaphors — although such noteworthy critics as Clark and Reynolds
 Chapter 6. The hegemony of growth in adolescent literature 145

work hard to avoid the hegemony of growth as a historical script. The use of meta-
phors of growth to describe change should give us all pause: do those of us in
childhood studies ever want to write about childhood and adolescence employing
metaphors that effectively entail youth as negative, as something to be outgrown?
 Afterword

As a feminist in the 1990s, I worried frequently about essentialism — meaning

that I worried that it was theoretically wrong to attribute behaviors to anyone be-
cause of biological determinants, such as sex or race. I still believe that. And yet
my work in cognitive narratology has helped me to see the significant ways that
our culture self-replicates ideas, such as the hegemony of growth in adolescent
literature, with entailed conceptual metaphors and cultural narratives that have
become scripted by repetition. If all I ever read are books about growth, I train my
brain to read for growth — and once my brain is trained to read for growth, I am
sure to find stories about growth everywhere. If I am a creative writer, I am sure to
replicate those patterns of growth as I write new stories. If I am a critic, I am sure
to analyze that pattern. Ideas about growth then become an almost endless loop in
adolescent literature.
We replicate scripts of growth to organize our own experiences of growth, to
organize our understanding of other people’s growth, and to help organize our so-
ciety — because in all cultures, all embodied beings are ever-changing. The catego-
rizations of infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and old age are pervasive
cognitive phenomena in western cultures that lead, in turn, to various language
structures that privilege growth. Metaphors of growth are one obvious example of
our cognition structuring a concept around our embodied experiences. Scripts of
growth, particularly the pattern of the Bildungsroman, are another example of our
cognition basing its conceptualizations in embodied knowledge. My motivation
for analyzing these scripts has been to ask how those conceptualizations trans-
late into cultural narratives that privilege certain models of growth, most notably,
growth as improvement, over other models of growth, such as the much less laden
concept of growth as simple change.
Cognitive readings of adolescent literature — and the closely related field of
children’s literature — can help attenuate scholars to the intricate relationship
between textuality and reception; that is, critics who are aware of the significant
role cognitive conceptualization plays in reading and interpreting literature for the
young have the potential to recognize how heavily dependent on the brain’s forms
of shorthand, such as schemas and scripts, narratives are. Moreover, cognitive read-
ings allow us to examine the role language and conceptualization play in creating
larger cultural narratives that influence the epistemology and ontology of youth.
148 Literary Conceptualizations of Growth

I submit that the cultural narrative that children will and must grow influences
many authors of adolescent literature, literary critics, and historians to privilege
metaphors in which growth is depicted in terms that are value-positive, as op-
posed to employing terms that are value-neutral or value-negative. In this way, the
biological fact of growth creates a metaphorical structure that can, if we are not
careful, devalue youth, defining and even limiting the epistemology of childhood
studies to privilege a conceptualization of growth as a hegemonic force within the
field of adolescent literature.
While it is true that there is nothing inherently evil about growth because it
is a fundamental factor in everyone’s life, I still cannot help wondering if we are
not somehow missing other ways of being, other epistemologies, that would help
young readers understand literature — and life — in less goal-oriented ways. After
all, in literary depictions, coming of age does have a clear-cut trajectory that is
defined by only one goal: maturity.
I hope that it is obvious that I am not arguing in favor of immaturity, either.
But I do wonder what the cognitive effect is on adolescents who experience the
repeated and privileged pattern of growth in their novels and their films. What
happens when brains are trained to read for goal-oriented growth? Do readers
themselves become so focused on achieving the end-goal — adulthood! — that
they diminish their own adolescent experience? Do teenaged readers learn to de-
value the time they spend as teenagers, before they have “grown up”? Do teenagers
develop false or limited impressions about what maturity actually is? And are there
negative implications on self-esteem? On values? On cognitive functioning?
Metaphors about growth are varied, but they are often entailed by embodi-
ment, and they clearly influence the ways that authors and critics script conceptual-
izations of growth in adolescent literature. Thus, when we examine the interaction
between cognition and conceptualization, we can begin to understand how the
embodied experientialism of growth to adulthood has profoundly influenced the
literature, literary criticism, and historical study of adolescence.
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 Index

A Armitage, Ella S. 135, 137 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 43,
Abaius, Cole 83n artificial intelligence (AI) 36 44, 46, 50, 56, 60, 65, 66,
Abel, Elizabeth 25, 84 As You Like It 128 67, 97, 102–103, 120, 121,
abjection 114–116 Asher, Jay 36, 46, 47, 49, 123, 130, 147, 148 (see also
Absolutely True Diary of a 50, 51 mind; thought)
Part-Time Indian, The 98, Brave 82, 85, 94
111, 112–116, 119 B Bray, Libba 53
Adams, Gerald 111n Barbauld, Anna Laetitia 59 bromance 86
adolescence (defined) 5n Baum, L. Frank 141 Buckley, Jerome 13, 24, 26,
and 55 Baxter, Kent 24 75n, 84
adolescent literature 1, 4, 5, behaviorism 2 Burnett, Frances Hodgson
7, 8, 11–12, 13, 14, 20, 21, Being-in-time 88–89 141
24, 25, 26, 32, 35, 36, 39, Being-towards-death 88–89,
46, 53–54, 55, 56, 57, 59, 93, 106, 129, 133 C
72n, 78, 79, 81, 98, 111, Berk, Laura 83–84 Cadden, Mike 1, 42n
114, 119, 120, 121, 123, Berzonsky, Michael 111n Campbell, Joseph 22
124, 138, 139, 144, 147, Bildungsroman 4, 8, 11, 13, Carpenter, Humphrey 142
148 (see also Young Adult 14, 22–23, 24, 25, 26–27, Cars 84, 86, 92
literature) 28, 39, 50, 51, 54, 75, 84, Cars 2 86
Adventures of Huckleberry 111, 147 Cartesian split 70, 97, 102,
Finn 11, 21, 28–33, 50, biology 13, 27, 51, 55, 56, 59, 133
51, 141 62, 102, 108, 110–111, 121, Catcher in the Rye 1
Adventures of Tom Sawyer, 123, 132, 133, 143, 144, categorization 2, 3, 15, 17,
The 141 147, 148 38, 56, 60, 62, 66, 67, 96,
Aesop 140 biophysicality 5–6n, 36, 54, 97, 98, 103, 105, 108–114
aetonormativity 111, 119 126, 129, 131, 133, 134, passim, 117, 118, 119, 123,
aging (to old age) 89, 90, 93, 137, 144 125–126, 128, 140, 147
110, 129, 135, 147 Bird, Brad 83, 86, 87 causality 51–53, 54, 82, 83,
Alcott, Louisa May 78, 141 Blackford, Holly 94–95n 84–85, 86–87, 88, 94
Alexie, Sherman 98, 112, Blake, William 103 Chanady, Amaryll 119
113, 114, 116, 117, 121 Blakemore, Sarah-Jayne 5–6, Chaney, Jen 83n
Allen, Theodore 109 6–7 Chapman, Brenda 82
Almond, David 98, 99, 105, blending 30, 43, 54, 55–62, childhood studies 133, 142,
119, 120, 121 66, 67, 70, 71, 74, 76, 78, 148
alterity 96 88, 90, 94, 113, 124 children’s literature 4, 8, 11,
American Born Chinese 36, Bodenhausen, Galen V. 96n 13, 25, 79, 138, 141, 142,
39, 40–42 Bomer, Randy 111n 143, 144, 147
Andrews, Mark 82 Borcherdt, Hans Heinrich Choudhury, Suparna 5–6, 6–7
Anne of Green Gables 11, 18, 22, 23 Choueiti, Marc 82
21, 103 Borges, Jorge Luis 108, 109 Christenbury, Leila 111n
Ariès, Philippe 136, 143 brain 2, 3, 4, 5–8, 14, 15, Clark, Beverly Lyon 139,
Aristotle 126, 127 16, 19, 21, 23, 24, 29, 32, 140–142, 144
160 Literary Conceptualizations of Growth

class, social 93, 112, 140, 141 conceptualization of growth Dusinberre, Juliet 142
Clodd, Edward 135, 137 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 11, 13, 14, 15, dynamic repertoire 36,
Coats, Karen 1, 4, 16n, 35, 20, 28, 35, 81, 83, 96, 108, 37–38, 39, 47, 53 (see also
72n, 114 118, 126, 127, 130, 132, script)
cognition 2, 4, 5–7, 8, 15, 16, 133, 139, 148
17, 19, 32, 35, 36, 38–39, conflation 19, 32, 71, 119 E
41, 43, 44, 45, 47, 49, 52, consciousness 2, 15, 56, elderly, the (see aging)
53, 54, 56–57, 59, 60, 66, 64–65, 70–71, 83, 96, embodied cognition/mind/
68, 70, 74, 78, 81, 82, 83, 97–98, 102, 103, 119, 120, reason 2, 3, 5, 14–15, 21,
88, 94, 95, 96, 98, 100, 101, 123 (see also sentience) 32, 99–102, 106, 114
102–103, 112, 123, 128, constructionism 55, 62, embodied metaphor 7, 8, 11,
143, 144, 147–148 (see also 110–111, 119, 120 (see also 17, 19, 20–33, 35, 46, 55,
blending; categorization; social constructionism) 57–59, 71–77, 79, 97, 103,
conceptualization; container schema 4, 16, 23, 119, 130
embodied mind; thought) 28, 36, 50, 71–76 passim, embodiment 2, 3, 4, 15, 19,
cognitive development (see 89, 103, 106–107, 130 21, 23, 33, 36, 39, 47, 49–54
cognitive growth) Cook, Crystal Allene 82 passim, 55, 59, 66, 67, 69,
cognitive growth 14, 16, 21, cool moonlight, a 55, 57–59 70, 74, 79, 92–93, 96, 97,
121, 124, 126, 133 Corinthians, I 127–128 98, 99–102, 103, 106, 112,
cognitive linguistics 2–5, Cormier, Robert 53 114, 115, 120, 126, 131,
7, 11, 14–15, 16, 17, 19, Cote, Chris 86n 137–138, 147, 148
32–33, 55, 78, 97, 98, 102, Cott, Jonathan 20 Emile 111, 130–131
103, 119, 120–121, 123 cultural construct (see emotion 35, 36, 53, 54, 71,
cognitive literary theory 4, constructionism) 74, 78, 84–85, 102, 103,
7, 11, 14, 35, 139 (see also cultural narrative 4, 7, 8, 38, 128, 129
cognitive narratology; 49, 53, 55–79, 81–96, 97, emotionology 44, 46, 47,
cognitive poetics) 112, 118, 119, 120, 123, 52, 53
cognitive narratology 5, 8, 14, 132, 139, 140, 142, 144, empathy 4, 41, 42, 84, 88
35–54, 55, 59, 60, 65, 79, 147, 148 (see also world empiricism 120, 121
139, 147 (see also reading) model) emplotment 8, 138–139, 140,
cognitive poetics 4, 5 141, 142, 144
cognitive psychology 46, D Engel, Manfred 13
84, 96 Dalsimer, Katherine 27 entailment 17–18, 19, 20, 21,
cognitive science 2, 14, 43, Darwin, Charles 133, 140 96, 105, 106, 120, 123, 124,
45, 65, 102, 108, 120, 123 death (as function of growth) 126, 134, 137, 138, 145,
cognitive structures 1, 3, 26, 39, 51, 58, 85, 88–90, 147, 148
21, 78 94, 95, 105–106, 113–114, Entwicklungsroman 13
colonialism 61, 77, 89, 109, 120, 128, 129, 132, 133, environmentalism 88, 92–93
118, 135, 140 136, 137 epistemology 7–8, 32, 35,
coming of age 22, 50, 57, 59, Descartes, René (see Cartesian 62, 97–121 passim, 123,
74, 75, 148 split) 126–138 passim, 144, 147,
complex metaphor (see Dilthey, Wilhelm 22, 23 148
metaphor, complex) Disability Studies 16n epistemology of the visual 62
concepts (defined) 2–3 discourse 33, 35, 99, 108, Erziehungsroman 13
conceptualization (as 110–111, 117, 118, 119, essentialism 42, 55, 121
cognitive process) 3, 4, 5, 120, 142 (see also language) executive functioning 6–7
8, 9, 11, 13, 14–15, 17, 18, Disney Studios 83, 86 experiential repertoire 36, 38
19, 28, 35, 37, 53, 55, 74, Disney, Walt 142 (see also schema; script)
76, 81, 88, 96, 97, 98, 102, Docter, Pete 81 experientialism 7–8, 97–98,
103, 105, 106, 108, 110, domain 17–18, 36, 37, 39, 47, 104, 119, 120–121, 134,
112, 113, 115, 118, 119, 48, 49, 53, 57, 60, 66, 67, 148
120, 121, 123, 124, 125, 68, 69, 71
137, 139, 147 dual audience 86
 Index 161

F 139, 140, 143, 144, 145, immaturity 4, 20, 83, 84, 85,
fantastic, the 113, 118–119 147, 148 88, 89, 92, 94, 95, 96, 134,
Faris, Wendy B. 116, 118n growth, psychological 4, 135, 136, 137, 148
Fauconnier, Gilles 14, 17, 56 14, 19–20, 20–21, 32–33, Incredibles, The 83, 85, 86,
feminism 24, 25, 83, 87, 95, 54, 78, 100, 143 (see also 92, 95
96, 147 cognitive development; intertextuality 52
Fiedler, Leslie 26 maturation) “Intimations of Immortality”
Finding Nemo 85, 87 Gulliver’s Travels 24 132
Fludernik, Monika 4, 57
47 98, 111–112, 116–118, 119 H J
Foucault, Michel 8, 70n, 108, Hall, G. Stanley 111n James, Henry 141
109–110, 124 Hamilton, Virginia 58 Johnson, Angela 55, 57, 59
Franklin, Benjamin 115 Hanawalt, Barbara 136–137 Johnson, Crockett 57
Freud, Sigmund 94, 133 Hanscom, Michael 83n Johnson, James 24
Frith, Uta 6 Happé, Francesca 6 Johnson, Mark 3, 7–8, 14, 15,
Frye, Northrop 138 Harold and the Purple Crayon 16, 17, 18, 19, 21, 32, 33,
Furay, Conal 139 57 71, 74, 97, 98, 99, 102, 108,
Hart, F. Elizabeth 35, 120 120, 121, 124–125, 126
G Hawthorne, Nathaniel 141 journey metaphor (see
gender 25, 27, 49, 51, 62, 82, Head, Edith 87 metaphor, journey)
83, 87, 88, 91, 95–96, 128 hegemony of growth (see Journey to the West 41
Generation of Animals 126 growth, hegemony of) Jung, Carl 138
Gerhard, Melitta 22, 23 Heidegger, Martin 82, 88,
Gibbon, Edward 138 106, 133, 137 K
Go Ask Alice 53, 78 Herman, David 4, 35, 36, 37, Keeper of the Isis Light 55,
Going Bovine 53, 78 38, 42, 44, 45, 52n, 79 61–62
Greenway, Betty 142 Hinton, S.E. 1, 78 Knowledge Structure Theory
Griswold, Jerry 20, 22n Hirsch, Marianne 25, 84, 36
Grosz, Elizabeth 121 94–95n Kokkola, Lydia 5
growth, archaeology of Hirschfeld, Lawrence 96n Kristeva, Julia 114
124–133 historiography 134–138, 139 Kümmerling-Meibauer,
growth, as literary concept history of ideas 7, 8, Bettina 4–5, 41–42, 45,
1, 5, 7–8, 11–14, 15, 20, 126–133, 134–138 81n, 84
21–28, 30–31, 32–33, 36, Hollindale, Peter 20 Künstlerroman 13
39, 46, 53–54, 57, 69, 71, Holmes, Linda 83n Kuznets, Lois 39
78, 79, 81, 84, 86, 94–96, homophobia 92
98, 111, 118, 123, 126, 139, Howe, Susanne 22 L
144–145, 147–148 (see also Hughes, Monica 55, 61, 62 Labovitz, Esther Kleinbord
maturation) Hunt, Peter 138 25
growth, biophysical 1, 3, 4, Hymns in Prose for Children Lakoff, George 3, 7–8, 14,
14, 19–20, 21, 23, 27, 28, 59–60 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 21–22,
32, 33, 54, 55, 100, 124, 24n, 32, 33, 71, 74, 97,
126, 147 I 98, 99, 102, 108, 120, 121,
growth, cognitive, (see I am the Cheese 53, 78 124–125, 126, 129
cognitive growth) identity 12, 25, 27, 31, 42, 75, Langland, Elizabeth 25, 84
growth, definition 3, 124 76, 77, 110, 114, 117 language 2, 3, 4, 5n, 8, 12,
growth, hegemony of 123, ideology 1, 26, 51, 59, 60, 15, 16, 18, 21, 32, 33, 36,
144–145, 147, 148 63, 68, 69, 70, 79, 82, 92, 53, 55, 57, 59, 72, 77, 78,
growth, metaphors of 1, 3–4, 96, 119, 121, 139, 140, 142, 100, 104, 107, 108, 120,
11, 20, 21, 27, 28, 29, 33, 143, 144 121, 123, 142, 147 (see also
37, 50, 51, 54, 67, 74, 88, imagination 20, 56–57, 59, discourse)
123, 124, 125, 126–138, 97, 105 Lasseter, John 83, 84, 85, 86
Lerer, Seth 138, 139–140, 144
162 Literary Conceptualizations of Growth

Lerner, Richard M. 6n metaphor, complex 71–74, N

Leseur, Geta 26–27 78, 104 Nancy Drew (series) 14
Lesnik-Oberstein, Karín 138 metaphor, growth (see growth, narrative theory 4, 5
Lévi-Strauss, Claude 38 metaphors of) native peoples 43, 61, 76–77,
Little Women 78 metaphor, journey 21–25, 112–116 (see also Spokane)
Locke, John 129–130, 135, 27–28, 37, 74–75, 77 Natov, Roni 12, 13
140 metaphor, ontological Naturalism 63, 64
lookism 61, 62, 82 124–125 Nelson, Claudia 142
Lukens, Rebecca 12 metaphor, orientational Nikolajeva, Maria 1, 4, 12,
Lyotard, Jean-François 60 124–125 13, 14, 41n, 45, 78, 84, 111
metaphor, primary 71–74 Nisbet, Robert 8, 125,
M metaphor, structural 124– 134–135
Mackey, Margaret 4 125, 126, 127, 128, 136 Njunjul the Sun 55, 71–77,
MacLeod, Anne Scott 24 metaphorical thought 97, 98, 119
Macrae, C. Neil 96n 102–108, 120 Nodelman, Perry 39, 41n,
magic realism 108, 116, 118n metaphors, spatial 20 119
Mahy, Margaret 36, 43, 45 metonymy 2, 30, 69
Mallon, Ron 110 “Michael” 132 O
mapping 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, Mickenberg, Julia 142, 143 Odyssey, The 81
32, 37, 49, 51, 56, 60, 63–69 Mills, Charles 110 ontology 7–8, 59, 97–121
passim, 89, 103, 104, 126 Milne, Alan B. 96n passim, 124–128 passim,
Marcus, Mordecai 24 mind 2, 5, 6, 21, 23, 28, 30, 132, 133, 134, 137, 138,
marriage plot 94n 35, 42, 44, 45, 54, 97, 99, 143, 144, 147
Marxism 96 100, 101, 120, 121, 125, Orientalism 109
Mary Poppins 86 130, 133, 134 (see also otherness 62, 96, 110, 112,
Maslow, Abraham 83 brain; Theory of Mind; 118, 119
maturation, (defined) 3 and thought) Outsiders, The 1, 78
84–85; 1, 7, 8, 12, 13, 14, Mintz, Steven 111n Ovid 127
19, 20, 21, 22, 26, 27, 28, Modernism 142 Oziewicz, Marek 4, 36
31, 32, 35, 36, 39, 51, 81, Monsters, Inc. 86
82, 84, 86, 88, 90, 91, 93, Monsters University 82, 86, P
94, 95, 98, 108, 110, 111, 91 Paul, Lissa 25
121, 123, 124, 128, 132, Montgomery, L.M. 11, 18 Paul, St. 127–128, 129
133, 137 (see also growth, “Moods of My Own Mind, Peck, David 24
as literary concept) No. 4” 132 perception 15, 16, 35, 36,
McCallum, Robyn 1, 12, Moreton-Robinson, Aileen 39, 44, 53, 54, 59, 62, 78,
22n, 60 109 99–102 passim, 103, 120
McDonald, Meme 55, 71 Morgenstern, Karl 22, 23 Persephone 94–95n, 95, 105,
memory 4, 35, 36, 39, 41, Mosley, Walter 98, 111, 106
46, 52, 53, 54, 59, 60, 78, 116–117, 118, 121 phenomenology 126, 131
130, 143 (see also muscle mother/daughter plot 94, philosophy 2, 7–8, 60, 82, 88,
memory) 94–95n 97–108 passim, 110, 119,
Memory 36, 39, 43–46 multiculturalism 4, 41, 110 120–121, 123, 125, 133,
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 102 Murphy, Gregory 2 134, 135
Metamorphoses, The 127 muscle memory 45–46, Piaget, Jean 84
metaphor 2, 3, 16, 38, 52, 65, 68 Pilgrim’s Progress, The 24
54, 57, 60, 63–71, 89, 93, “My Heart Leaps Up When I Pixar maturity formula
94, 105, 113, 114, 115, Behold a Rainbow in the 85–88
123, 134, 137, 139, 143, Sky” 132 Pixar Studios 81–96
144, 147, 148 (see also My Name is Mina 98, Plotz, Judith 142
embodied metaphor; 99–108, 121 Poems in Two Volumes 132
metaphor, primary; mythic 22n, 39, 40, 95n, 115, Pollock, Linda 136n
metaphor, complex) 116, 117 post-colonialism 25, 96
 Index 163

post-structuralism 35, Scanlon, Andrew 82 Steinburg, Laurence 6n, 7

120–121 Schank, Roger 36–37 Stephens, John 4, 12, 22n,
Pratt, Annis 25 schema 7, 38, 147 38, 54, 60
Premack, David 6 Schultz, James A. 134, 136n stereotypes, cultural 41,
primary metaphor (see science fiction 116 42, 49, 60, 62, 82, 83, 87,
metaphor, primary) script 4, 7, 8, 36–39, 40–42, 92–93, 96, 119
Propp, Vladimir 38–39 45, 46–54, 55, 57–59, 60, stereotypical knowledge 36,
Pryor, Boori Monty 55, 71 62, 69, 70, 74–79 passim, 37, 38, 40, 41, 46, 47, 49,
Ptolemy 128, 129 82, 83, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 54, 62, 95
puberty 5n, 32, 56, 110 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 103, Stevenson, Robert 86
116, 118, 123, 137, 139, Stewart, Susan L. 42n, 70n
Q 144, 145, 147, 148 (see also Stone, Lawrence 136
Queer theory 96, 111 emplotment) story function 38
script of growth (defined) storying 36, 121
R 53–54, 78 storytelling 5, 35, 42–43, 44,
race 42, 58–59, 61, 62, 73–77, sentience 63, 64–65, 68, 45, 46, 52, 53, 121
92–93, 96, 98, 108–120, 147 71, 88, 100 (see also Swales, Martin 23
race talk 110 consciousness) Sweet Valley High (series) 14
race theory 96 separation anxiety 82, 90–94 Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush
racial skepticism 110 sequence 7, 36, 40 58n
racialism 110 series fiction 14, 20, 78
racism 29, 42, 58, 60, 61, 71, sex 62, 147 T
75–77, 78, 92, 110–119, sexism 60, 61, 62, 81, 82, target domain (of metaphors)
136 83, 86, 89–90, 92–93, 94, 17, 130–131
Ratatouille 86, 87, 92, 95 96, 114 Tennyson, G.B. 22–23
reading (and cognition) 7, sexuality 26, 27, 48, 49, 51, Theory of Mind (TOM) 6–7,
8, 21, 32, 36, 38–39, 40, 72, 75, 85, 92–93, 94, 95, 45, 82, 84–85
41–42, 45, 47, 49, 51, 142 Thirteen Reasons Why 36, 39,
52–53, 54, 56–57, 59–60, Shakespeare, William 46–53
66–67, 67–68, 74, 78, 79, 128–129, 133, 137 thought (as function of brain)
100, 111, 115, 118, 119, Shusterman, Neal 55, 63–64, 2, 3, 6, 15, 16, 18, 35, 45,
121, 138, 142, 143, 144, 65, 66, 67, 68, 70, 71 53, 56, 62, 97, 100, 101,
147, 148 Siddons, Frances 6 102–108, 120, 123 (see also
realism 13, 39, 113, 116, Sizemore, Christine Wick 25 brain; mind)
118–119 Skellig 98, 99–108, 118 Townsend, John Rowe 24
“Red Wheelbarrow, The” 52 Smagorinsky, Peter 111n Toy Story 83, 84, 85, 86, 90
relativism 120 Smedley, Audrey 108–109 Toy Story 2 85, 86, 87, 90, 92
resiliency 83–84, 94 Smith, Melissa Sara 20n Toy Story 3 82, 85, 86, 90–94,
Reynolds, Kimberley 139, Smith, Stacy L. 82 95
142–144 social class (see class, social) Trites, Roberta Seelinger 1,
Richardson, Alan 4 social construction 55, 56, 78n, 94n
Robinson Crusoe 24, 140 110, 119, 121 Turner, Mark 4, 21–22, 24n,
Romanticism 134, 140, 143 Sommerville, C. John 137 53, 56, 120, 129
Rose, Jacqueline 141 source domain (of metaphors) Twain, Mark 11, 21, 28–32
Rosenberg, Teya 119 17, 74, 130–131 passim
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 111, Spacks, Patricia Meyer 25–26
130–131, 135 Spengler, Oswald 135 U
Russell, David 12, 13 Spokane (nation of) 112, unconscious thought 2, 14,
115–116 15, 17, 19, 28, 56, 71, 78, 96,
S Stange, G. Robert 23 97–98, 102–108, 120, 123
Said, Edward 109 Stanton, Andrew 85, 86 Unkrich, Lee 82
Salevouris, Michael J. 139 static repertoire 36, 38 (see Unwind 55, 63–71
Saussure, Ferdinand de 57 also schema) Up 81, 85, 86, 88–90, 94
164 Literary Conceptualizations of Growth

V West, Elliott 136, 137 Wu Cheng’en 41

Vaillant, George 83 White, Barbara 24–25, 27
values 102, 103, 107, 108, 121 White, Hayden 138–139 Y
Vandergrift, Kay 12 Wilson, Adrian 136n Yang, Gene Luen 36, 40,
Vidali, Amy 16n Winnie-the-Pooh 140 41, 42
Vindication of the Rights of Wizard of Oz, The 141 Young Adult (YA) literature
Woman, A 131–132 Wojcik-Andrews, Ian 86 1, 4, 11, 13, 20, 24, 41, 45,
vision (as understanding) Wolf, Virginia 12 51, 54, 91, 112, 118
16–17, 17–18, 106 Wollstonecraft, Mary
Vygotsky, Lev 45 131–132, 134 Z
Woodruff, Guy 6 Zamora, Lois Parkinson 116
W Wordsworth, William 124, Zunshine, Lisa 4, 45, 59–60,
WALL·E 86, 88 132–133, 134, 137 66, 82
Waller, Alison 1, 13, 118–119 world model 79, 82, 95 (see
West, Cornel 108 also cultural narrative)