The Girl Next Door: Postapocalyptic and Everyday Heroines in Popular Young Adult Texts

• In Event: Producing the Young Citizen in Texts of Families, Neighborhoods, and Nations

Abstract

(Objective and perspectives)
In an effort to bridge students’ in and out of school literacy practices, teachers often select texts for reading and viewing that feature teenage protagonists in order to engage with notions of identity, community and belonging. This paper focuses on three popular young adult texts to gain an insight into the portrayal of young heroines – female protagonists that display courage in the face of danger to protect themselves or their community – and the ways in which these portrayals both construct and speak back to an image of the ideal female citizen. The study of English in Australian schools includes the reading and viewing of a range of literary, media and everyday texts, and the three texts selected for textual analysis intentionally blur the boundaries of these spheres in order to reflect the curriculum experience of teenagers in Australian schools.

(Methods and materials)
In this paper the figure of the heroine is explored using three popular young adult texts – the post-apocalyptic novels Tomorrow When the War Began by John Marsden and The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, and the television soap opera Neighbours. These texts are analysed through the lens of the monomyth (Campbell, 1968) and feminist models of the ‘heroine’s journey’ (Murdock, 1990; Frankel, 2010) to identify the ways in which teenage heroines are constructed as having a certain set of qualities, dispositions and strengths. The heroines that appear in the texts are compared and contrasted to identify representations of femininity and citizenship that are being encountered by young people studying texts and literature in contemporary times. The three texts will also be considered in relation to the policy imperative in Australia to create “active and informed citizens [that] act with moral and ethical integrity…work for the common good…[and] are responsible global and local citizens” (MCEETYA, 2008, p. 9). The role that texts for young adults can play in differently constructing an ideal of active citizenry that is recognizably feminine is explored.

(Conclusions and significance)
All three of the texts in this study feature heroines that are signified as ‘girls next door’. The teen-aged protagonists are initially located in their family homes and local neighborhoods where they are well known by other community members and discourses of domesticity and family responsibility are frequently evoked. However, using the perspective of geography we see that in each of these texts the heroines are drawn outwards beyond familiar locations and that this carries an important political meaning relating to female independence (Morgan, 2000). Therefore, while these texts at times work to promote explicit and didactic discourses of citizenship to young audiences, they also represent problematic aspects of citizenship such as the relationship between gender and power, the reproduction of normative social roles, and performance of citizen duties. This paper will illuminate how discourses of femininity are intertwined with notions of citizenship in texts, and the role that such messages play in the identity formation of would-be heroines.

Author

• Kelli McGraw, Queensland University of Technology