NOTE ON COLOR-CODED HIGHLIGHTS: YELLOW= EXTREMELY IMPORTANT; BLUE = INTERESTING
Are You There, Reader? It’s Me, Margaret:
A Reconsideration of Judy Blume’s Prose as Sororal Dialogism
Joseph Michael Sommers (bio)
Abstract
Judy Blume’s 1970 problem novel Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret explores the dynamism found not just within the sociocultural shift in the plot of young female protagonist but also a shift between authored subject and reader. This article re-examines Blume as a writer not simply working within the staid boundaries of the problem novel but as an author testing the boundaries of narrative space and time to construct a “sororal dialogism” between reader and narrative protagonist. Blume genders the text by creating a conversation of an empathic nature, constructing bonds between girls on subject matter once considered taboo.
That’s another thing. My mother’s always talking about when I’m a teenager. Stand up straight, Margaret! Good posture now makes for a good figure later. Wash your face with soap, Margaret! Then you won’t get pimples when you’re a teenager. If you ask me, being a teenager is pretty rotten—between pimples and worrying about how you smell.
—Margaret Simon, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret (25)
I am only somewhat joking when I attribute the above lines to Margaret Simon rather than to Judy Blume, author of the 1970 problem novel Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. The passage immediately rejoins a comment by Margaret’s mother that playfully chides Margaret for not only not acting her age but presupposes that Margaret’s attitude will only worsen as she ages: “Margaret! I don’t know what I’m going to do with you when you’re a teenager if you’re acting like this now” (25). For the record, Margaret is eleven. As the epigraph indicates, Margaret is painfully aware of her impending post-pubescence and all the demands that adolescence holds for her (a need for better posture, cleaner complexion, and, possibly, deodorant [1]). Adolescence, though, does not make these expectations upon her; rather, her mother does and, to Margaret, that is intolerable—so intolerable, in fact, that Margaret breaks the fourth wall of Blume’s text and seeks out someone, anyone, to vent her frustrations. The anyone in question here, I would argue, is the reader herself—someone who, presumably by the function of the problem novel, seeks out textual Margaret in order to safely confront and comprehend a personal difficulty outside of the text[GT1]. Margaret could have this conversation with her mother. She could, [End Page 258] as the novel’s title suggests, address God. (Problematically, as Margaret notes, God rarely returns phone calls.) She could even have this conversation with her new friends Janie, Gretchen, and Nancy, members of the Pre-Teen Sensations, a club founded in order to address such vital pre-adolescent concerns. Yet, she bluntly tells the reader, “If you ask me, being a teenager is pretty rotten” (emphasis mine).
While this interpretation could be seen as playful, Blume’s style and humor invites this sort of reading. Her work has been lauded and excoriated alike for it but rarely does it garner her, or the problem novel as a subgenre of adolescent literature, critical consideration[GT2]. Marjorie Allen argues that, too often, “the ‘problem’ takes over the novel,” causing the “story” to suffer as little more than subsidiary and secondary (87). Deborah O’Keefe dismisses these narratives as “typical” and “thin,” singling out Blume in particular as “the star of this mass-market realm [of] messy problems [with] characters created from a menu, not understood from within” (187). Charles Duke damns the problem novel with faint praise when he argues that all these novels offer is a “sympathetic and realistic perspective” to an adolescent population not prepared to handle difficult subject matter (418). I can agree with all of these perspectives to some degree,1but I still find the problem novel defensible, particularly when considered as a subgenre defined along gender lines. In fact, Duke’s contention brackets my interests in both Blume and Margaret. He labels the position of the text as sympathetic: the reader reads in order to feel sorrow for the protagonist in a manner the reader can assimilate. Yet, it seems that the nature of Margaret’s thoughts is inherently dialogic[GT3] or, to work with Duke’s terms, empathic: neither Margaret nor the reader uses the text in order to solicit pity from the other. What function would a “pity party” serve a reader by herself? To the contrary, the inherently dialogical quality of the much-dogged style of Blume’s problem novels seems to invite an opportunity for girls, both textual and extratextual, to share difficult feelings surrounding an otherwise vexed and occluded[GT4] public discourse.
As my interests in Blume’s gendered dialogism suggest, I propose examining Blume not along the lines of her supposedly thin character and plot development so much as to investigate what function her work serves within this mass-market realm. For while Blume’s young adult fiction has raised a mixed critical reception to say the least,2 she has never had trouble placing her work into print; since the late 1960s, she has written or edited over twenty books, 75 million copies in circulation. I would suggest a raison d’être for that success falling along the lines of her reclaiming a once popular narrative form—the avuncular novel—and reintroducing it into public circulation by writing not for males but, instead, adolescent women in a time period where such a text could thrive as a novel illustrating growth, self-cultivation, and empathy.3[GT5] O’Keefe agrees, though she probably would not recognize it as a positive critique; speaking about Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, she writes: [End Page 259]
With Judy Blume . . . problems like first menstruation or wet dreams were reasonably matter-of-fact: these were just another kind of problem that young people had to handle. That was comforting. An eleven-year-old girl character (and reader) could worry equally about buying a bra and choosing a religion . . . Life included all of this, and it could all be coped with or survived.
(187)
“Coped with or survived”: O’Keefe chooses an interesting set of words to decry Blume’s writing, but she unwittingly strikes at the heart of my argument. As I reconsider the problem novel in light of its progenitor, the avuncular novel, the specific nature and universality of the “mother/daughter plot,”4 and the empowering extra-literary social and political climate of the 1960s and 1970s, I find that Blume uses her narrative to create sororal bonds between text reader and the text being read[GT6]. Problem novels such as Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret interrogate the boundaries of novelistic discourse and attempt to operate as surrogates for girls growing into their roles as young women. Through the invocation of the young reader as a direct communicant, the female protagonist could engage in discourse with someone about whom she might try to learn. Narratives such as Margaret become safe havens for adolescents to overcome what has been called the “ignorance” of adolescence, and to do so from an adolescent’s perspective of a “safer way”: that is, a way free from adults and through the networking of likeminded adolescents (Sullivan 82, 84). Through Margaret we can see this process illustrated; Blume writes narratives that contain “a steady mixture of humor and pathos, . . . designed to traverse traditionally difficult . . . subject matter which empathizes with her largely female audience through the first-person perspectives of her young protagonists” (Sommers 263). Textual examination of Margaret will illustrate how Blume reconsiders discussion of once-considered opprobrious [GT7]gendered subject matter in the 1960s and 1970s with an adolescent audience of young females eager to enter into dialogue with someone (even textually created someones).
Avuncularism Recast as Sororal Dialogism[GT8]
To the critic of contemporary children’s and young adult literature, it might seem odd to predate Blume’s use of sororal dialogism in the nineteenth century, but there has been considerable critical discussion on a tradition once gendered male and used, primarily, abroad. Avuncularism is a topic rarely discussed outside of nineteenth-century British literature and even less so within relatively contemporary young adult fiction such as Judy Blume’s problem novels. And rightly so: the contentious use of the term arises from the definition of the word itself: a combination of auus, “an ancestor,” and unculus, meaning “diminutive” (Knoepflmacher 53). Therefore, to be avuncular—or, to place it into the terminology of a subject position within a text, to be an avunculate—all a character should have to do is act as “a substitute for the ancestral parent” as a figure less than the father, such as an uncle (53). The actual gendering of the term derives only from its etymology (auunculus literally means “mother’s brother” [End Page 260] [53]), yet its critical and narratological etiology seems to be inextricably tied to its use in nineteenth-century literature where well-known male avuncular figures populated the landscape of domesticity in novels such as Middlemarch, Mansfield Park, and Tess of the d’Urbervilles.
More recently, critics who consider the occurrence and function of avuncular relationships within texts have been more forgiving of the term’s gender and usage outside of the nineteenth century. In Structural Anthropology Claude Levi-Strauss, for example, expanded the term’s use past hierarchal familial relations to looser lateral bonds such as those between the husband and wife, among siblings, or even to those paired in a loose “kinship” that mirrors connections observed in familial or otherwise domestic situations (39–40, 43). Likewise, Michel Foucault reinforces the idea that it is not the blood that binds the avuncular relationship; the bonds between two people may be “polymorphous,” arising “out of a will to knowledge” as they seek “support” (11–12). Foucault, of course, does not openly discuss avuncularism (or even invoke the term) as much as he discusses the nature of power in the relationship, perhaps with good reason. Used tersely, the term is a vexing and highly anachronistic descriptor, particularly in more contemporary contexts and applications such as discussions of same-sex relationships and constructing the idea of kinship itself. Eve Sedgwick addresses this problem, claiming:
The easiest path [to fixing the term] would be an advocacy of a more elastic, inclusive definition of “family,” beginning with a relegitimation of the avunculate: an advocacy that would appeal [to] models of kinship . . . enough to do justice to the depth and sometimes durability of non-marital and/or non-procreative bonds, same-sex bonds, nondyadic bonds, bonds not defined by genitality, “step”-bonds, adult sibling bonds, nonbiological bonds across generations etc.
(71)
Sedgwick’s concern seems to surround the historical restrictions of the term in contemporary application. This same concern has troubled other critics similarly: Richard Goodkin claims that he was “forced” to use the term “for lack of a better one” (1016). At least for Goodkin the term almost temporally fits his discussion of Proust’s works. When Eileen Cleere chooses to invoke avuncularism to discuss the twenty-first-century American mob drama The Sopranos, I would argue that Sedgwick’s remarks take on a greater heft and prescience (211). Given a strict, terse definition of avuncularism, Cleere’s position might be untenable. Still, she writes: “In contemporary American pop culture, where ideology tends to be most visible and hegemonic [witness] The Sopranos, where fathers are scarce and the alternative “family” of mafia criminals is held together by the avuncular chain of Uncle Junior, nephew/Uncle Tony and nephew Christopher” (211). If the avuncular bond serves as little more than a substitute, or a surrogate, for a nonexistent familial tie, then it begs the question of why gender, hierarchy, or even narrative subject position should matter in discussions of the avuncular text. As I consider its usage in works for the young adult, I must contend that they do not.[End Page 261]
In fact, in considering contemporary narrative avuncularism in Margaret, I contend that Blume’s work not only illustrates her understanding of the avuncular position created by the narrators of her texts, but she also proffers a unique application of Sedgwick’s reconceptualization of avuncularism. Blume reconstructs the concept of the avunculate by placing her young female readers[GT9] in the avuncular role; the characterization of her protagonists, in contrast, I would no longer term as an avuncular bond but more as a sort of sororal dialogism. The invocation of M. M. Bakhtin’s terminologies is intentional. Bakhtin’s theories allow for the transmogrification[GT10] of the avunculate that Sedgwick seeks. For if I consider Blume’s work in the early 1970s as a direct product of a revisionist feminist culture of “social unrest” in the United States, then one could view the problem novel’s audience as a direct avunculate to Blume’s young female narrators (Trites 8). If the 1960s climate of political and sociocultural change created an audience of young adolescent women who felt that their needs and desires were being left textually, let alone publicly, unaddressed (8), then could Blume’s construction of a narrator compelled toward discussing sensitive, vexing, and often publicly opprobrious subject matter be seen as a form of dialogism between reader and textually created other? Clearly, I believe so. Judy Blume transformed the texts these young women consumed during the late 1960s and 1970s into a literature that spoke to them about difficult issues when no one else would.
From Avuncular Narratives to Dialogical Problem Novels: Blume through Bakhtin
Bringing Bakhtin[GT11] in to help clarify an already vexing and difficult discussion is much akin to bringing a drowning sailor fresh water to quench his thirst. The use and language of Bakhtin’s narrative theories is readily acknowledged as daunting and humbling to many scholars (myself included), but his concepts of dialogism and the chronotope will allow me to reconceptualize and relocate the avunculate from the nineteenth century into the twentieth. As dialogue has been far more used and critically discussed, I will deal with the latter terminology first. In Bakhtinian critical circles the interrelation of time and space is what Bakhtin labels, quite literally, the “chronotope,” or the “form-shaping ideology,” of any particular literary genre (“Forms of Time,” 250). Bakhtin asserts that literary genres do not merely transcribe the thoughts and ideas of any particular culture vis à vis the writings of any one person. Rather, genres and subgenres “makes discoveries” about particular events in the composition of works designed to discuss the “people and events” of any given time and place with an audience who will comprehend them in potentially any other time and place from whence the original words were published (Morson and Emerson 366).
Reconceptualizing the avuncular novel through this filter allows me to address Sedgwick’s concerns with the concept that, when one moves a genre with specific functionality, such as the domestic or family novel, from one time [End Page 262] period to another, the use and reception of the genre’s function changes commensurate with the changes in the audience. Bakhtin’s chronotope addressees this concern: “chronotopes are highly sensitive to historical change: different societies and periods result in different chronotopes both inside and outside literary texts” (Holquist 112). This idea is not meant to use Bakhtin as a panacea to any particular literary situation demanding the intersection of time, place, and reader, but it reminds us that chronotope operates, much as most things do in the novel for Bakhtin, dialogically. Bakhtin’s dialogism welcomes different types of voices (heteroglossia) and any number of voices (polyglossia) into the text in the effort to decrease the “semiotic totalitarianism,” the monologism of any particular time and place, evidenced within a text (Morson and Emerson 28). In essence, Bakhtin sees a text’s dialogism as the capacity and opportunity with which the text has to override the accepted, tolerated, and normative discourses of a culture through the introduction of voices that would be otherwise occluded from the text’s conversation.[GT12]
If we locate this theory within Margaret, Blume can be seen to seek out the staid concept of the avunculate in Anglophone family romances of the nineteenth century and reintroduce it as the problem novel of the twentieth century. In pulling the family romance away from a European time and location and placing it into twentieth-century America, Blume alters the genre of her work by including her audience in the narrative moment. For example, Blume takes Margaret’s considerations of her own person and pushes the boundaries of her internal narrative by having Margaret explain her motivations to the reader, interrupting the narrative itself. In a discussion of the Sixth Grade Square Dance, Margaret’s thoughts wander between exposition and gossip with the reader:
The girls shuffled around more than the boys because most of us wanted to get Philip Leroy for a partner. And finally I got him. This is how it happened. After everyone had a partner we had to make a square. My partner was Jay Hassler who was very polite and didn’t try to step on my foot once. Then the caller told us to switch partners with whoever was on our right side. Well, Philip Leroy was with Nancy on my right side, and Nancy was so mad she almost cried right in front of everyone.