Facing the "Ick" Factor

A few months ago, I read an interesting blog post on Frances Hunter's American Heroes Blog that talked about William Clark and his two wives (sequential, not concurrent, by the way). Clark met the girls who became his wives when they were tweens (11 and 14, to be specific) and he was "just past 30," according to the blog. He eventually married the younger of the girls, Julia Hancock, when he was 37 and she was 16. As the blog author said, "...we may recoil with a certain ick factor today...."

The book I just finished had a similar "ick factor."

How Far Should Realism Go?

Mary Kole had a thought-provoking post and discussion in the comments on her blog at Kidlit.com this week about sex in YA novels. I was especially interested in it for a couple of reasons: first, because the feedback that accompanied an agent's rejection of my full manuscript included the comment, "You can put sex in YA novels" (which I hadn't); and second, because I missed sex in my most recent read, Glenn Vernam's Pioneer Breed.  (Gosh, I hate to keep being critical of that book since I liked it so much when I was a kid....)

Before I explain the above remarks, let me clarify my thoughts on sex in novels.  Most of the time, I cringe when I read explicit scenes, because they seem to be handled in one of two ways.  There are those that are sort of clinical in their descriptions, and those just seem creepy - I feel like I'm some kind of peeping tom spying on people when I shouldn't be. There was a scene from A Northern Light that left me feeling that way. A couple of months later, I'm still repelled by that scene (and maybe that was Donnelly's intention, but that's what pops into my mind first when I think of that book, and I really wish that wasn't true). The second approach to sex scenes seems to be to use euphemisms for everything and to make everything seem so highly passionate. Honestly, I am more embarrassed reading those scenes than the first kind. I never made it completely through a category romance novel because I just felt ridiculous.

I'm not trying to say there shouldn't be any sex scenes in books, even YA books. But for me, those scenes ought to play a key part in the plot. A good example of a sex scene that was needed in a book comes from Alice in Love and War. Sure, Turnbull could have chosen to skip over that part and say "Alice gave herself to Robin," but seeing Alice's feelings as she does it is crucial to understanding why she acts the way she does later in the book. A sex scene that I think wasn't important at all to the plot was in Jellicoe Road, when the two main characters sleep together after going to try to find the girl's mother (sad - I can't remember her name). Readers know the two of them are attracted to each other, but having them have sex adds nothing to that subplot, in my humble opinion.  It's sort of like the author shrugged and said, "well, you know it would happen, so I'll stick it in there to be realistic." That's not a good enough justification for me.

That thought brings me back to Pioneer Breed. I've summarized the plot before, but to save you the trouble of hunting up those posts, here's a quick synopsis: 17-year-old Rance has been orphaned by Indians and is trying to live alone on his parents' farm. One day while he's out hunting, he finds a 15-year-old girl (Tenny) who has been orphaned by an Indian attack, and he takes her to his house, where he nurses her through illness and gives her a place to live during the harsh Oregon winter.  He realizes he's going to have to take her to town when spring comes, and he's concerned that people may treat her badly because she's been living alone with him all winter.  He ends up solving the problem by deciding to marry her, a decision that comes as a huge revelation to him.

Until he decides to marry Tenny, Rance has shown no sexual awareness of her at all, not even when he was doctoring her with poultices on her chest and back.  Granted, he tried to be decent about it, which I guess shows some awareness of her as a woman. But it's never framed in those terms; instead it is just an example of the decency any young man who had been raised right in the mid-nineteenth century would exercise.  But I'm pretty sure males were the same then as they are now and as they were when David spied Bathsheba bathing from his rooftop. I'm not saying I wanted lasciviousness to run rampant in Rance's thoughts throughout the book - not at all.  But realistically, there would have been some struggle in the mind of even a decent young man, especially as the two of them begin to enjoy each other's company so much and to feel so cozy in the cabin together.  In my humble opinion, the thought that he could marry Tenny and be with her in every way would have occurred to him much sooner, realistically. 

One of the points that kept coming up again and again in the blog post was that teens expect realism. As Mary said,

Truth and authenticity are important in all children’s books, but in YA especially. No matter what you do, make sure it rings true to real life.

Teens are masters at sniffing out things that don't ring true. And they tend to be unforgiving of anything they label as "phony." I think Vernam's book would get that label today, unfortunately. I don't believe it was his intention to be preachy; I think he was just writing a "clean" book, and that meant leaving sex out completely. My question is, can a book be "clean" and still realistically portray the sexuality that all human beings possess, in its great variety of expressions?

That's not just a rhetorical question. It's one I've struggled with in writing my own novel. As the agent noted, there were no explicit sex scenes in my book, even though the main characters are married and it would be morally OK.  Yet there are enough references to sex in the book - anything from feeling desire to "fading to black" just before the characters do the deed - to make me wonder if what I've written would be considered "clean." I hope so, but if not, I hope it is at least realistic.  Actually, I guess it's more important to me to be realistic than to be squeaky "clean."

Hey, Girls, Be Glad It's the 21st Century

My 11-year-old daughter has recently decided she wants to be a zoologist and work with big cats. She also wants to be a chef, thanks to too much time spent watching the Food Network with her dad. Whether her goals will stay the same over the next ten years or not, I don't know. But I do know she at least has a chance to be those things, which is more than could have been said had she been born in a different time.

I'm reading Daughter of Fortune by Isabel Allende right now, and I just can't keep from thinking about how restricted women's lives used to be. (Warning: There may be spoilers below!) The part of the book that got me started thinking about this theme was when Eliza turned 16 and her guardian/mother figure, Rose Sommers, begins to try to set up a "proper" marriage for Eliza. That's what girls did for most of human history - get married, whether it's really what they wanted to do or not. I think about Catherine, Called Birdy by Karen Cushman that I read last summer - Birdy isn't even old enough (only 13) to really have any idea of what she might want to do (assuming she had the choice), and yet her father is already searching around for a husband for her. Even women who were capable of taking care of themselves in a lot of ways, like Hannah in Hannah Fowler, realized that the world was stacked against single women. Eliza's guardian, Rose, is a good example of that. She never married, but she still had to be attached to a man's household in order to have any social standing. Luckily, she had an unmarried brother for whom she could serve as mistress of the household. Otherwise, she would have had a very sad, marginalized life.

I'm also struck by how much marriage has been used as an economic tool throughout history. Birdy's father isn't concerned with whether Birdy will like her new husband, but whether her marriage will add to the family's prestige and wealth. Mary Hoffman's The Falconer's Tale has at least two examples of a young woman who was married off to an older man to enhance her family's economic position. I guess this shouldn't be a surprise to me, but the practice really reduced a daughter to a commodity.

I suppose it's even more specific - it's the young woman's virginity that is a commodity. In Alice Turnbull's Alice in Love and War, Alice realized she had "lowered her market value" as soon as she slept with Robin. In Daughter of Fortune, there are three women who are seduced by lovers and face the consequences of lowered market value: Rose, who never marries and gets to/has to serve as housekeeper and hostess for a brother who silently but most definitely holds her "fallen" status over her head; Joaquin Andrieta's mother, who is thrown out of her family when she becomes pregnant and who is forced to raise her son in abject poverty; and Eliza, who actually gets off easiest, I think. I'm not sure what would have happened had she stayed in Valapraiso rather than running away to follow Joaquin to California. She might have faced a fate similar to Rose's, or she might have been tossed out, like Joaquin's mother. But because she broke the accepted social norms and found a way to follow Joaquin, she gets to have a satisfying relationship with Tao Chi'en (I think - I'm not completely finished yet, but I've read ahead a little, and it looks like that's where things are going). She gets a happy ending - though people at the time wouldn't have thought so, since she married outside her race. I guess they would have thought that fate was more disgraceful than either of the others.

One last thing strikes me as I read this. How unfair is it that the women have to pay for their lack of sexual self-control, but the men get a free pass, so to speak? Rose is put in a very restricted social role that could be blown apart if the story of her past was revealed. Joaquin's mother is sentenced to a life of desperate poverty and an early death from disease because she got pregnant out of wedlock. Eliza takes drastic action to get to the father of her baby, even if it means the danger of stowing away on a ship to a place she's never been before. Yet Joaquin and Eliza's father, John Sommers, get to go on their merry ways, pursuing their dreams of gold and their lives without another thought of the circumstances faced by the lover they left behind. Unfair!

I'm not trying to argue that girls should get a free pass for a lack of self-control, any more than boys should. These stories just make me reflect on what limited lives women used to have, and to feel fortunate that the world has changed in ways that allowed me to marry for love, not economics, and that give my daughter the chance to be a zoologist chef who feeds her leftovers to the tigers.

This should be required reading....

(Note: This entry will be rife with spoilers!)

When I was a teenager, I ordered a paperback copy of a little novel called I Want to Keep My Baby through the Scholastic book orders. It was about a teen girl who got pregnant and whose teen boyfriend refused to marry her. She decided to keep the baby and raise it on her own. I think the reason I bought it was because I was curious about sex, and reading about it in a book (although I don't remember there being very much, ha ha) was preferable to talking about it with my parents.

Well, that was a long time ago, and the world has changed a lot, but some things haven't changed. Teens are still curious about sex, and they generally don't want to talk to their parents about it. And they don't have to - messages about sex are everywhere in popular culture. Watch a half-hour of music videos, in any genre -- flip through the ads and articles in popular magazines -- read the books at the top of the young adult list -- you'll see plenty about sex, and most of it is much more explicit than anything in I Want to Keep My Baby. However, there's one thing you don't see a lot of, and that's consequences of sex.

That's why I say Ann Turnbull's fine historical novel, Alice in Love and War, should be required reading, at least for teen girls. Alice is one of them, albeit living 300+ years ago. She feels stifled and trapped on the farm owned by her aunt and uncle, who adopted her when her father died. She's 16 years old, old enough to be recognized as a sexual being (including by her uncle, who has recently begun to make advances toward her). She longs for escape and love. Both present themselves in the form of Robin, a handsome, flirting young soldier with the Cavilier army (this is during the English Civil War). Alice falls hard for Robin, and provoked by the fear that he will be leaving soon when the army moves on, she gives her virginity to him in a clandestine meeting in an abandoned shepherd's hut.

Part of Alice knows she shouldn't have done it, but she justifies her decision by convincing herself that Robin loves her - the fact that he wants to make love to her proves that, doesn't it? When the army is ready to move on, she begs Robin to take her with him, and he does. For the next several months, Alice follows the army. She is very lonely, even though she makes friends; she has little time to be with Robin -- except at night, when he always manages to find a place where the two of them can be together. Just before the army is going on leave for winter, Alice discovers she is pregnant. When she tells Robin, he evades her insistence that he must marry her, and when she wakes the next morning, he's gone. He's left her a note and some money, but no mention of marriage or of a way she can contact him.

Long story short, Alice goes through the pain and heartbreak of miscarrying the baby. When Robin does return in the spring, Alice has to seek him out and confront him, at which time he confesses that he is already married and had, in fact, gone home for the birth of his second child with his wife. Alice has made friends among the wives of other soldiers, so she remains with the army. Eventually, however, her friends are killed and she manages to find refuge in a small village nearby. There she meets a Parliamentary soldier who is severely wounded, and she helps nurse him back to health. As she sits by his bed and reads to him and talks to him, she falls in love with him, but she fears a godly man like Jem will never have anything to do with a woman with her history. When Jem returns to the army, they continue a correspondence, and eventually he asks her to marry him. Alice gets a happy ending, after all.

I think there are so many messages of value in this story for young women. Yes, one of them is that sex is a pleasurable thing that draws people together. However, the story also brings home the message that if the situation surrounding the sex is not right, the worry and insecurity and shame outweigh any pleasure. From the first time Alice slept with Robin, she was worried - about losing him, about the perceptions of other people, about becoming pregnant. She constantly has to reassure herself that he loves her, drawing on any little sign she can muster - or manufacture. Her married friends and their intimate knowledge of their husbands (and I mean "intimate" in the sense of knowing something deeply, not just sexually) contrasts sharply with the fact that Alice knows almost nothing about Robin, and she feels that lack. She tells herself that Robin takes care of her, but looking at it from the outside, we can see that he leaves her to fend for herself during the day, reappearing each night to take her somewhere that they can be together - even if that place is shared with a dozen other couples. There's no getting around it - Alice made a mistake, and even when she won't admit it to herself, she knows it.

I'm glad Turnbull redeemed Alice in the end, though, and gave us a picture of a positive courtship. Through the sickbed conversations and their letters, Alice and Jem come to know each other as people long before the relationship becomes a sexual one. Wait, I take that back. Alice feels herself attracted to Jem fairly early in their relationship, and I'm sure the same is true of Jem. But they don't allow that attraction to get out of control and to dominate the relationship. Their sexual attraction to each other is only one facet of their entire, healthy relationship. On their wedding night, Alice "felt not only passionate but also safe and certain in a way she had never felt with Robin."

In my humble opinion, that's the message teens need to get about sex. Parents and teachers and preachers may say it over and over, but I think sometimes a story may be more effective in allowing teens to reach their own conclusions. And that's why I think this book ought to be required reading.

Entry for March 20, 2007 - At Long Last, Satisfaction

(Note: This will contain spoilers!)

Ok, I'm being a little snarky with that title. Forged in the Fire is the sequel to No Shame, No Fear (see my entry for January 19). The romance between Susanna and Will that begins in No Shame picks up again -- after three years of letter-writing between Susanna (still in Hemsbury) and Will, who has gone to London to try to find work after being disowned by his father. And I must admit -- Will and Susanna aren't the only ones who come away from this story satisfied; when I finished it last night (after devouring it in less than 24 hours), I felt that it was just right -- a delightful historical romance, worthy of sitting on the same shelf with something like The Witch of Blackbird Pond.

I thought No Shame, No Fear was Susanna's story, even though Will tells half of it and much of the plot centers around the conflict with his father that Will faces after deciding he will be a Quaker. Forged in the Fire is Will's story, at least for the first half of the book. He is in London, which in 1665 is on the verge of major historical events. Turnbull does very well in winding her plot through those events, making them personal through Will. He suffers brutal treatment in prison for being a "Dissenter"; he loses his employment (and therefore his prospects for providing for Susanna as his wife) because of plague; a year later, his home and livelihood are burned to the ground in the Great Fire of London.

Against these momentous events, the relationship between Will and Susanna plays out, more important in their perspective than anything else that happens -- and isn't that realistic? Despite what's going on in the world, the thing that most concerns us is what's going on in our own small lives. They've been corresponding for three years through letters that take weeks to travel from one to the other, staying faithful to their promise to be true to each other, planning their marriage as soon as Will is set up well enough to provide a suitable home. All that is thrown into question when Susanna unexpectedly comes to London and sees Will in a situation that makes her doubt their relationship can actually work. They are estranged for some weeks, only to be reconciled by a noble and unselfish act on the part of their common friend, Nat Lacon. (More about him in a minute.)

The only thing that disappointed me a little was a lost opportunity. Turnbull did such a good job in No Shame of portraying Susanna's "moment of faith" -- the point at which she realized she did have the strength to be true to her faith and to do the right thing, even if it was painful. It was one of my favorite parts of the book. Turnbull sets Will up for something similar -- and then doesn't deliver, because of the demands of the romance, I guess. But here's what I wish she had done: when Will is sent to prison (not for the first time, by the way), he admits the gate of the prison "always filled me with dread." He suffers horribly in the prison, and he knows he's not "made of the stuff of martyrs." He nearly dies, but a wealthy Friend rescues him and nurses him back to health. This man just happens to have a lovely daughter near Will's age, a daughter who is not yet committed to being Quaker. She has just been to visit cousins who are still Anglican, and she says going to church is "easier" than being a Quaker. I think here would have been a good opportunity to have Will face the temptation of an easier life, one free from persecution and fear -- but -- it's the author's choice. And I'm not dissatisfied with her choice.

I do feel sort of bad for poor Nat, though. He's that secondary character who gets stuck in the role of making things work out for others. Oh, Turnbull sort of throws him a bone at the end, but that's exactly what it seemed like -- a convenient "let's make sure Nat has someone, too." I feel like he deserved better.

Can you tell these characters came to life on the page for me??

I want to add these additional thoughts about this book that came from a discussion I had with someone in a different context (I was recommending the book for a teen reader):

I recently read a pair of books by Ann Turnbull set in 17th century London -- No Shame, No Fear and Forged in the Fire. The story is set in England, and the historical element is the persecution of Quakers and then the dramatic events of 1665-66 in London (the plague and the Great Fire). The main story, however, focuses on the relationship between an Anglican boy and a Quaker girl. The first book, I thought, did very well with portraying infatuation -- in the end, however, the characters make a mature decision to postpone a quick marriage. The second book picks up after three years of waiting for each other and keeping their relationship alive by letters. There is a brief "coming together" scene that I thought was handled tastefully and that is followed immediately by the young man's determination to carry out his responsibility to provide for his wife-to-be. Although the physical element of their attraction to each other is a part of the story, the characters always view that element in relationship to other parts of life, like religion and economics, and I think that is a good example for young people. After all, sex is part of life, but it doesn't rule life -- which is not the message teens get from so many media sources.

Entry for January 19, 2007 - In Which She Questions Her Moral Strength (and Reflects on Young Love)

The first book I've read this year is No Shame, No Fear by Ann Turnbull. It's the story of a young Quaker girl, Susanna, living in 1660s England when persecution of the Quakers has started to gain momentum. When her father is jailed for refusing to pay tithes, Susanna moves from her home in the country to a nearby town to be a servant in another Quaker's print shop to help support the family. There she meets and falls in love with Will, the son of a wealthy and powerful merchant in town. Will is questioning his own faith and is drawn to the simplicity of the Quaker meetings, which puts him at odds with his father, who of course attends the state-sanctioned Anglican church. During the months that pass in the story, the persecution of the Quakers intensifies, and Susanna's own faith and strength of character are put to the test -- in more ways than one.

I don't know much about Quakers, and I had no idea there had been such violent persecution in England (and in the colonies -- the book mentions that four Friends were hanged in Massachusetts). So I felt like I learned something, which is always nice. Reading about it also made me wonder (as Susanna did) whether I would be able to stand up to persecution if the time came. I belong to a small and stubborn religious group that has been labeled a "cult" by mainstream denominations -- of course, we have religious freedom in this time and place that weren't part of 1660s England. But still . . . . my son was called an "atheist" at school the other day because he won't go to the "Christian Student Union" meeting that is supposed to be non-demoninational but isn't. That's not exactly the same as being put in the stocks, but still . . .

Susanna has a lot to deal with for a 15-year-old girl, especially after most of the adults in her life are herded off to prison indefinitely for daring to meet for worship. She has a lot of doubt about whether her faith is as strong as theirs, but she just keeps doing what she thinks would be the thing she should do, and I think she ends up being heroic in her own way. Some of the time, though, I think she's selfish -- she knows Will is giving up practically everything about his life to be with her and to follow his new faith, but she doesn't really seem to care. She wants him, and she knows that because she's from the lower classes (and Quaker), she'll never be accepted in his world. So he'll just have to come to hers.

I felt for Will. I thought the book did a believable job developing the rift between Will and his father that becomes a gulf. Although the father is the one who becomes most agitated and violent, there are lots of times when Will's immaturity (he's only 17) leads to the conflict. He had other choices that could have made the situation a little less volatile. That seemed pretty realistic. But besides losing the relationship with his family, Will also loses opportunity. He had a chance for a plum apprenticeship and gives it up -- and I think that had more to do with Susanna than with becoming Quaker. As I read this, I wondered how much of Will's decisions were being made by his mind & faith, and how much by his . . . . loins. But again, that rings pretty true. I very nearly moved to Baton Rouge once -- away from my family and a good job -- just to follow "the love of my life." (I'm really glad I didn't.)

That brings me to the last thing I want to say about this book -- it was a satisfying romance. Hmmmm . . . maybe "satisfying" is not the right word, because things don't turn out in the end the way you want them to. But things turn out the way they ought to turn out. Turnbull did a great job of evoking those emotions of first love -- without being sleazy. Reading this, I can remember that awkwardness two people feel when they first become aware that they are attracted to each other, and the way every sense is intensified when your beloved is near. I was really impressed. The only thing I wish had been a little different is that Susanna's "voice" in the story and Will's "voice" are so similar it's not easy to tell them apart sometimes. The book is written in alternating chapters -- first she tells part of the story, then he tells the next part. That didn't get confusing, but I don't know . . . . I just thought they sounded a little too much alike. Not a fatal flaw, though.