Out of the Best Books

Today I started reading a book called Reviving Ophelia. It's been on my reading list since I stumbled across it when I was working on a research paper for a college class a couple of years ago. The other day I picked up a copy of it at D.I. while I was browsing for other books to get for my classroom and I couldn't put it down. I stood in the aisle between the adult paperbacks and the children's picture books for the better part of half an hour, reading a random chapter I had flipped to somewhere in the middle of the book.

The subtitle and tag line of the book are "Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls: An eye-opening look at the everyday dangers of being young and female and how adults can help." It's written by a clinical psychologist who specializes in working with teenagers. Don't worry--it's not half as didactic as it sounds; quite the contrary. Mary Pipher begins the book asking why she is seeing so many more girls in therapy today (the book was first published in 1994) than she did twenty years past, and asking why the girls she sees now are so much more deeply troubled than they seemed to be a generation ago. She says,

"Reviving Ophelia is my attempt to understand my experiences in therapy with adolescent girls. Many girls come into therapy with serious, even life-threatening, problems, such as anorexia or the desire to physically hurt or kill themselves. Others have problems less dangerous but still puzzling, such as school refusal, underachievement, moodiness or constant discord with their parents. Many are the victims of sexual violence. ... [Even my daughter] and her friends were riding a roller coaster. Sometimes they were happy and interested in their world; other times they just seemed wrecked. They were hard on their families and each other. Particularly junior high seemed like a crucible. Many confident, well-adjusted girls were transformed into sad and angry failures. ...

"At first blush, it seems things should be better now [than a generation ago]. After all, we have the women's movement. Hasn't that helped? The answer, as I think about it, is yes and no. ... Many of us are doing things our mothers never dreamed of doing. But girls today are much more oppressed. They are coming of age in a more dangerous, sexualized and media-saturated culture. They face incredible pressures to be beautiful and sophisticated, which in junior high means using chemicals and being sexual. As they navigate a more dangerous world, girls are less protected.

"As I looked at the culture that girls enter as they come of age, I was struck by what a girl-poisoning culture it was. The more I loked around, the more I listened to today's music, watched television and movies and looked at sexist advertising, the more convinced I became that we are on the wrong path with our daughters. America today limits girls' development, truncates their wholeness and leaves many of them traumatized."

(And I don't mean to sound alarmist or sensationalist here, but I can swear to you that if you feel like Pipher is exaggerating here, then you haven't spent much time in a junior high lately.)

The last paragraph of Dr. Pipher's preface really got to me. It reads,

"What can we do to help them? We can strengthen girls so that they will be ready. We can encourage emotional toughness and self-protection. We can support and guide them. But most important [sic], we can change our culture. We can work together to build a culture that is less complicated and more nurturing, less violent and sexualized and more growth-producing. Our daughters deserve a society in which all their gifts can be developed and appreciated."

As their English teacher, I recognize my role as one of the main, sometimes the only, purveyor of printed culture in my students' lives. I feel a strong sense of responsibility for choosing books that will help accomplish these aims--building a culture and a taste for literature that is "less complicated and more nurturing, less violent and sexualized and more growth-producing." And yet, as I went over the book units I'd tentatively selected for my sixth graders, I started to worry.

Three of the titles are not my choice. They are mandated by the curriculum program our school has chosen: The Iliad, The Odyssey, and Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. (I know, right? "For sixth graders? Really?" Yes, apparently.) Complicated? Violent? Sexualized? Check, check, check.

But it got even worse as I considered the books I had personally selected, books that are widely accepted as actually being grade-level appropriate for sixth graders: Maniac Magee by Jerry Spinelli and The Giver by Lois Lowry. Mind you, I had not chosen these books arbitrarily or without forethought. I wanted literature that would be engaging and relevant to my students. I wanted main characters who were close to my students' age and who asked the same kinds of questions about the world as my students do. I wanted books that were less violent and more interpersonal than the mandated titles. And, probably most importantly, I wanted good, engaging stories that could help even my most reluctant readers feel more comfortable about picking up a book. The two I settled on, in my mind, accomplished all of these goals.

But where on earth are the girls? No, seriously--where are the female role models? Heavens, where are the females? As I read the introduction to Reviving Ophelia, I quickly realized that my book list needed some serious revision. None of these books have a female protagonist. In fact, there are almost no female characters at all! Sure, Odysseus' wife Penelope makes a few short appearances, and a handful of other girls drift from page to page in the other books. But nowhere to be found was the kind of young woman that a girl in one of my classes could look up to. Nowhere was there a "nurturing...growth-producing" storyline or even a small, uplifting female character sketch to help combat the violence and--yes, I dare say it--blatant male chauvanism in the required readings.

How had I done this? I had worked hard to think of my critical groups: racial minorities (check, sort of, in Maniac Magee), reluctant readers (who are, much more often than not, boys), unskilled readers (neither of my book choices are technically difficult), and so forth. But I had neglected to listen to the voices of at least half of my students--the young women who, in my projected classroom, would be force-fed an entire year of "boy books" because their teacher knew that girls will read a book with a male protagonist much more willingly than boys will pick up a book about a girl. Shame on me.

So now I'm back to the drawing board. I need a book (or several) that's both appropriate for sixth graders and that will help me "build a culture that is less complicated and more nurturing, less violent and sexualized and more growth-producing"--these phrases keep ringing in my mind. And yet I worry that my English teachers of the past (and even my college professors) have fallen into the same trap I did: I can't think of a single book I read in a junior high or high school English class that would fit the bill. These kids are way too young for Speak; I don't want to serve them fluff like that Meg Cabot garbage; and--call me crazy--I don't want to teach a fantasy novel, no matter how much anyone may like Ella Enchanted or Princess Academy. I want real girls who live in roughly the same Seventeen Magazine-saturated world as my students and who still make it out okay. I'm thinking of replacing Maniac Magee with Stargirl--same author, similar tone, much more true to these concerns. But I worry that high schoolers Leo and Stargirl are a tad too old for eleven-year-olds.

Help? Please?

(Oh, and I could use the same advice for my seventh graders, too. At least they have to read Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank. It's a start...?)