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Research: What I've Learned From These Sources

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Research: What I've Learned From These Sources

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- Theodora Dobbs

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Research Paragraphs - Fairy Tales and YA Fiction

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Disney released its new live re-telling of its classic fairy tale Cinderella last week to mostly good reviews and high enthusiasm.

This, after we've already consumed almost the exact same story in cartoon form for years, read the fairy tale itself, and consumed countless remixes of it, from Ever After to Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister to Pretty Woman to Into the Woods to... you get the point.

And Cinderella is hardly the only tale with this power. Consider how many different ways stories like The Wizard of Oz, Snow White, Romeo and Juliet, even Batman have been reinvented over the years.

But why do readers do this? Why do some stories keep readers coming back again and again? How do fairy tales stay popular for so long?

Well, there are a few reasons fairy tales are so timeless.

Fairy tales are shared experience

An abused, lonely girl gets a lucky break to have one beautiful night of perfection, but stays too long and leaves a shoe behind in her rush get away before the spell is broken.

It's a story almost all of us grew up with. The simple fact that we all share it makes it meaningful to adapt it.

These stories give us meaning to believe in

"Have courage and be kind." That's the message the new Cinderella movie repeats again and again.

Or what about Beauty and the Beast, and its faith in finding the beauty within?

And Superman is constantly fighting the good fight in the name of mankind's innate goodness.

Then there's Romeo and Juliet, Exhibit A for the kind of love that makes everything else fade away.

These messages may come off as simple platitudes sometimes, but people never want to stop believing.

We fill in the gaps with ourselves

Fairy tales break the key rules of characterization. For all their oddity and distinctiveness, the characters of fairy tales are often underdeveloped, if you look at their more traditional versions.

The same could be said of many of our most retold stories.

And therein lies the attraction-when a story gives us gaps, we fill them with ourselves. With so much to explore, there's no end to the possibilities, and the results are deeply personal and compelling.

As our culture changes, we bring our stories with us

With every generation comes a fresh perspective, and a whole new set of experiences, values and ideas to be delve into.

With a whole cast of characters ripe for us to project onto, it's easy to see how certain stories don't get old no matter how many times they're spun into something new.

So why does any of this matter?

Why does any of this matter for you, dear writer? Good question, glad you asked.

As writers, we bend over backwards to find totally original story no one has ever heard of before-but we're too hard on ourselves. It's not about absolute originality, it's about the fresh take that is true to you.

Don't be afraid to borrow from the greats-plenty of other greats are. Just add yourself.

What story keeps you coming back again and again? Let me know in the comments section.

PRACTICE

What story or fairy tale would you love to re-tell? What's your unique spin on the story? Do a fifteen minute brainstorm to think through your story, and then share it in the comments.

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Why Fairy Tales Are Still So Popular - The Write Practice

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Disney released its new live re-telling of its classic fairy tale Cinderella last week to mostly good reviews and high enthusiasm.This, after we've already consumed almost the exact same story in cartoon form for years, read the fairy tale itself, and consumed countless remixes of it, from Ever After to Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister to Pretty Woman to Into the Woods to...

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Familiar Fairy Tale Picture Books Transformed into Teen Novels

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Familiar Fairy Tale Picture Books Transformed into Teen Novels

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ALAN v30n2 - Familiar Fairy Tale Picture Books Transformed into Teen Novels

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Offering students the opportunity to compare a picture book with a teen novel allows us to review familiar tales with students. Some teens may not know traditional fairy tales. Here is a chance to acquaint them with an aspect of cultural literacy they may have missed in their childhood.

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The emergence of this thing called "youth culture" is a distinctly 20th-century phenomenon; the collision of increased standards of living, more leisure time, the explosion of post-war consumer culture and wider psychological research into adolescents all contributed to the formation of this new social category defined by age. Previously, the rite of passage between childhood and adult life had not been so clearly demarcated -this is not to say that young adults didn't have their own activities before the invention of Brylcreem and crepe soles (youth gangs were common in Victorian Britain, for example) but it hadn't before been defined or packaged as a culture.

Once "invented", the "youth culture" provoked a variety of often contradictory responses: youth was dangerous, misunderstood, the future, a new consumer group. British post-war youth culture emerged primarily in response to the American popular culture centred on rock 'n' roll. The 1955 film Blackboard Jungle, with its soundtrack featuring Bill Haley And The Comets' Rock Around The Clock, was a defining moment, inspiring people to dance in the aisles (and some to slash seats). The fear was not only of hoodlums but also of the creeping Americanisation of British culture.

But the impact of imported US films and music did not lead to cultural homogenisation; instead, it inspired a series of spectacular - and distinctly British - youth subcultures from the mid-50s to the late-70s: teds (quiffs, Elvis, flick-knives, crepe soles, working-class London origins circa 1953, drug of choice: alcohol); mods (Jamaican-rudeboy/Italian-cool style, US soul, purple hearts, The Small Faces, scooters, working-class London origins circa 1963, drug of choice: amphetamines); skinheads (Jamaican ska, exaggerated white, British, working-class masculinity, contrasting starkly with middle-class hippiedom of the same period, boots, braces, shaved heads and violence, sometimes racist, late 60s origins, drug of choice: amphetamines); punk (Sex Pistols, spit, bondage, swastikas, circa 1976, drug of choice: glue and amphetamines).

Drug use became a feature of youth subcultures from the Mods onwards - not just any old drugs, but ones that characterised and defined the subculture in question. Mods chose speed because it made them feel smart and invincible; it also gave them the energy to keep on the move, awake at all-nighters (and through work the next day). Later, within rave culture, drug use - this time, ecstasy - was central to the point of being almost obligatory.

Dick Hebdige, acommentator on youth culture, argues that the multicultural nature of post-war Britain was crucial to the formation of many subcultures; each one, he says, should be seen as a response to the presence of black culture in Britain, the ska/rudeboy-inspired two tone movement being a particularly vivid example. The tribes were created through the amalgamation of particular types of cultural goods; music, fashion, hairstyles, politics, drugs, dances - with their boundaries defined through crucial choices: Vespas or Harley-Davidsons, speed or acid, Dr Martens or desert boots. But then, youth culture is full of contradiction: the desire to express individuality by wearing the same clothes as your mates, and rebelling against capitalism at the same time as being a perfect capitalist slave.

Britain also led the way in the study of youth, and its celebration of creativity and resistance, though these studies, naturally, have their favourite subcultures, often overlooking others. (Still, the kiss of death for any subculture is to be "understood" by a sociologist.) By the late 70s and early 80s, youth subculture began to change, and became less gang-oriented. The regular emergence of new subcultures slowed down, and the first major period of revivals began. It became difficult to identify distinct subcultures, rather than just musical styles. In fact, something weird happened: everyone started behaving like a teenager. By the 90s, "proper" grown-ups had started to complain that contemporary youth were dull and conformist, and the music of small children became the preferred choice of most teenagers - Pinky & Perky dressed up as Steps.

Today, there are still plenty of new genres of music, but they don't have such visible subcultures affiliated to them. Even something as recent as 80s dance music and rave culture - after its initial, Smiley-faced, ecstasy-fuelled unity - fragmented into a multitude of sub-genres with no definable set of cultural attributes. Despite society's consistent attempts to regulate youth culture, perhaps the main cause of its demise in recent years is the extension of adolescent behaviour until death by the Edinas and Patsys of this world. Youth culture is now just another lifestyle choice, in which age has become increasingly irrelevant.

Timeline
1929 Borstals open as special prisons for adolescents.
1947 School-leaving age raised to 15.
1953 The Wild One, starring Marlon Brando. ('What're you rebelling against?' Brando replies: 'What've you got?') First reportings of teds in the UK media.
1957 Elvis scores his first UK number 1 with 'All Shook Up'. First UK youth TV broadcast, Six-Five Special, on national TV.
1959 Mark Abrams's The Teenage Consumer outlines the potential of youth as a new consumer group.
1967 Radio 1 launched.
1971 Misuse of Drugs Act.
1977 The Sex Pistols' God Save The Queen charts at number two in Silver Jubilee week.
1981 Inner-city youth/race riots in Brixton and Toxteth.
1989 First recorded UK ecstasy-related death: Clare Leighton in Manchester's Hacienda club.
1994 Criminal Justice Act targets travellers, festivals and raves.
Topics

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The emergence of this thing called "youth culture" is a distinctly 20th-century phenomenon; the collision of increased standards of living, more leisure time, the explosion of post-war consumer culture and wider psychological research into adolescents all contributed to the formation of this new social category defined by age.

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The icon indicates free access to the linked research on JSTOR.

Ellen Conford, who died on March 23, was one of the pioneering writers of what was then a nascent literary movement: young adult (YA) fiction. In honor of her life and work, here's a look back at YA before it was YA-a time when librarians struggled not just to define a genre, but to figure out how to get books about young readers in the hands of young readers.

Though young adult literature has arguably existed since at least Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House series, which was published in the 1930s, teachers and librarians were slow to accept books for teenagers as a genre. "Today, many librarians are acting like frightened ostriches," Mary Kingsbury complained in 1971. Afraid of parental criticism and the threat of concerned administrators, she claimed, librarians were turning away from a tide of literature about and for young adults. "Librarians may never span the generation gap," she predicted, "but by sensitive book selection they can demonstrate an awareness of the particular hang-ups being lived through by young people."

Today, young adult fiction is a force to be reckoned with.

Just seven years later, the phrase "young adult" was becoming increasingly common in libraries. But with the new title came new concerns about realism in books for young readers-books that, according to Maia Pank Mertz, worried adults who feared that "some young-adult novels defy, or indeed attempt to subvert, society." Mertz, on the other hand, defended the trend of "New Realism" in young adult novels, looking at books like S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders and challenging librarians to "develop students who can critically examine our culture's covert as well as overt assumptions."

By 1980, critics were already looking for some kind of canon of young adult novels. Noting that the genre had begun to tackle "subjects of real depth," Linda Bachelder and colleagues nominated 17 books, including Robert Cormier's The Chocolate War and Judy Blume's Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret as "classics" of the genre. By comparing young adult novels to books by classic authors like Faulkner and Dickens, Bachelder helped legitimize books for young readers.

Another decade led to even more legitimacy for young adult books. In her 1989 essay "Laughing with, or Laughing at the Young Adult Romance," Brenda O. Daly noted that young adult literature was extremely popular with its intended audience-but that adult critics made the mistake of assuming it was all the same. By interrogating works such as Conford's Strictly for Laughs, Daly pointed out a new trend in YA: books that explore "the territory of female imagination" and act as inclusive portrayals of teenagers.

Today, young adult fiction is a force to be reckoned with -books for children and young adults gained 22.4% in sales in 2014, and a whopping 55 percent of YA novels are now purchased by adults. The genre's road toward legitimacy has been a rocky one, but we can thank pioneers like Ellen Conford for blazing a trail for YA.

Resources

JSTOR is a digital library for scholars, researchers, and students. JSTOR Daily readers can access the original research behind our articles for free on JSTOR.

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A Brief History of Young Adult Fiction - JSTOR Daily

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How two world wars and the industrial revolution created the modern teenager

Most people point to Rebel Without a Cause, the seminal 1955 James Dean movie about youth rebelling against their parents, as the introduction of the modern teenager. But the teenager began long before that. The history of the teen begins at the turn of the 20th century. In 1900, much like flight or motion pictures, the teenager wasn't a relevant category. You were a child, then you got a job and you were an adult. Much of what defines the modern teen - listlessness, dissatisfaction and rebellion against the inadequacies of the previous generation, and an obsession with freedom, especially as it relates to automobiles - didn't exist, because the freedom to have those dissatisfactions wasn't available to the adolescents of the day.

But the concept of a "teen" was actually born when The New York Times published its monumental 1945 article " A 'Teen-Age Bill of Rights," which outlined a 10-point set of rights each teen ought to have in the immediate aftermath of World War II, with the influx of American teenagers back from war and into civilian society. The piece, a serious one aimed at providing something of an instructional manual for parents, was the first important use of the term "teenager," though the word was first employed in a July 1936 review of G. Stanley Hall's Adolescence. (The term "the teens" had been used since the 17th century, but wasn't expressed as teenager or teen-ager until the 20th century.)

"In our current debate over 'teen-agers, the pendulum has swung between 'What is wrong with our children?' and 'What is wrong with us?' One result is that the average parent often finds himself bewildered," author Elliot E. Cohen began.

The rights outlined include "the right to make mistakes, to find out for himself," "the right to have fun and companions," and "the right to question ideas." While we largely take those things for granted today - especially the right to have fun, a particularly modern invention - they were revolutionary at the time. Previously, teenagers were a part of the workforce. School often stopped when they became old enough to work on the farm or in a factory. Higher education existed, especially as a feeder into white-collar professions (lawyers, doctors, accountants, priests and the like), but it was exclusively the province of the middle and upper classes.

Matt Wolf, the director of , a documentary about the early history of the teenager, told Collectors Weekly that the labor movement is partially to thank for the invention of adolescence. "We also felt like the Industrial Revolution and the advent of child labor was a good way to bracket the story, since once you went to work, you were no longer considered a kid," Wolf says. "When they started to make child labor illegal, this second stage of life emerged, and it needed a name. It was called adolescence."

The invention of adolescence, the more catholic umbrella category from which teendom sprung, is traceable back to G. Stanley Hall, the first president of the American Psychological Association and author of the two-part turn-of-the-20th-century opus entitled Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime and Religion. In his twin volumes, Hall hoped to categorize and explain the emergent youth and leisure class. His efforts mirror modern parenting manuals, although with a slightly more sinister bent. Hall believed in Darwinism and popularized the phrase "storm and stress" with reference to adolescence. Translated from the German Sturm und Drang, Hall believed that the stress brought on by risky behavior, moodiness and fighting with parents helped to develop the mind as we grow into adulthood. The Sturm movement emphasized strong emotions and relativity over fully objective thought.

Strangely enough, the phrase "Sturm und Drang" first appeared a little less than a century before the movement inspired, in the title of a German play about the then-ongoing American Revolution. Johann Wolfgang Goethe was a major figure in the movement, particularly with his early literary sensation, The Sorrows of Young Werther, a novel about young obsession and suicide that became basically the Harry Potter of its time. (Since he was an early-20th-century evolutionary psychologist, it only makes sense that Hall also believed that he could create a super-race through forced breeding and involuntary sterilization.)

Jon Savage, author of the book that inspired Wolf's documentary, says that Hall's work was prophetic of the ways in which teenagers would shape the American identity even though it came out four decades before the term reached true popularity. "It was published in 1904, and what he did at the end of the book, which really struck me, is say that youth is part of American nationalization," Savage told The Washington Post in 2014. "And I thought that was really powerful, because obviously from a British standpoint, the 20th century was an American century, and after the Second World War, America was the great ideal."

Of course, Hall's manifesto also coincided with the Industrial Revolution and a pushback on child labor more generally. Or better put, a moral pushback - e.g., the National Child Labor Committee formed in 1904, focusing mainly on state legislation to gradually outlaw child workers - that struggled to gain legal traction. So while Congress passed laws restricting child workers, the Supreme Court overturned them. Like the Court's 1918 ruling in Hammer v. Dagenhart, whichdeclared such laws unconstitutional. Similarly, a constitutional amendment passed Congress in 1924 that would've banned the practice, but states refused to ratify it, partially due to the conservative climate at the time. It finally ended (more or less) with the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act, a piece of legislation that mandated a minimum wage and maximum hour standards, effectively removing children from the labor pool for the manufacturing and mining industries.

"A self-supporting and self-respecting democracy can plead no justification for the existence of child labor, no economic reason for chiseling worker's wages or stretching workers' hours," President Franklin D. Roosevelt told Congress while introducing the act.

His opponents derided it as creeping socialism, arguing that American business would struggle to "find any time left to provide jobs if we are to persist in loading upon it these everlastingly multiplying governmental mandates and delivering it to the mercies of multiplying and hampering Federal bureaucracy." Only after a series of resounding progressive victories in special elections, showcasing the level of public sentiment for the bill, did it pass over Southern protests.

A ground of young British soldiers during World War I

Meanwhile, World War I nearly wiped out Europe's teen populace, largely because of a massive demographic gap between Germany and the rest of the powers arrayed against it. At the war's outbreak in 1914, for instance, Germany had 3.7 million soldiers in its wartime army; Britain, on the other hand, had just 700,000 available men. A campaign to recruit volunteers attracted hundreds of thousands of willing recruits, including 250,000 under the legal fighting age of 19. And while the enlistment of young men dropped sharply after the institution of a draft in 1916, many still fought and died on the battlefield. John Condon, just one of the approximately 18 million to die during the war, was just 14 years old when he died fighting for Britain. Overall, the Great War claimed between 1.61 percent and 1.92 percent of Europe's total population, including a disproportionate number of teenagers and young adults.

In America, the war's despair ushered in a live-like-there's-no-tomorrow sensibility and began a decade-long export of silent films, jazz and the jitterbug to Europe. "The annihilation of a generation of young men in World War I led to the despair of T. S. Eliot's Waste Land, which showed high culture in ruins," legendary social critic Camille Paglia wrote in her New York Times review of Savage's book. "But it also set off the manic pleasure-seeking of the Roaring Twenties, energized by populist jazz. Savage's account of that decade's international party scene is electrifying. The Bright Young People, typified by socialites like Brenda Dean Paul and Nancy Cunard, amazingly prefigure the carousing celebs who saturate our own media."

But as war faded, a burgeoning new class of person burst into prominence - the teen-ager, as the Times might have written it back then. They came with both promise and a seemingly boundless capacity for savagery. In Britain, teenage gangs called hooligans ran rampant. And the Zoot Suit Riots of 1943 were an excellent example of the violent, often racist character of early American teens. These clashes were sparked when a group of young white soldiers claimed they'd been jumped and beaten by a group of Mexican-Americans in zoot suits. What followed was essentially an all-out war between them, with the police on (shocker) the white people's side.

"The question goes deeper than just [zoot] suits," Eleanor Roosevelt said at the time. "It is a racial protest. I have been worried for a long time about the Mexican racial situation. It is a problem with roots going a long way back, and we do not always face these problems as we should."

So the youth needed to be controlled.

An early remedy: the Boy Scouts. The Scouts were founded in 1911, but didn't come to prominence until the 1930s, when their membership surpassed 1 million.

"In 1908, a British man named [Robert] Baden-Powell said that he found a solution to the problem of youth," Matt Wolf, the documentarian, told HuffPo. "He wrote a military training manual for the young called Scouting for Boys, and it became a manifesto for the Boy Scout movement. In the Scouts, young boys transformed from hooligans into fit and healthy soldiers, primed for war."

By training teenagers as warriors, the Scouts were able to conscript young people into society. Rather than the dissolute swing kids or the wild Victory Girls, American youth would be easily controllable and disciplined. Essentially, Boy Scouts were nerds, but nerds who wouldn't do things like incite race riots.

One of the paradigms of such militarized adolescence was the Hitler Youth. Though Germany was certainly home to examples of young people resisting the Nazi movement - the Kittlebach Pirates, in particular, were a thorn for the Hitler Youth and Nazis in general - many were swept up into its teeth. Savage says a key slogan was "Youth will be led by you."

Their ultimate demise then came mostly because of the massive and heroic sacrifice on the part of millions of American, British, French, Russian, Spanish and Chinese teenagers. Each of them went to war as teens but came back as adults. And by beating back the militaristic tide of fascism, they created the opening for the truly modern teenager to develop - the 1950s teeny bopper seen in everything from Back to the Future to Rebel Without A Cause.

"Young people 16 to 20 are the beneficiaries of the very economic collapse that brought chaos almost a generation ago," Life wrote in a June 1954 article called "The Luckiest Generation. " "The Depression tumbled the nation's birth rate to an all-time low in 1933, and today's teenage group is proportionately a smaller part of the total population than in more than 70 years. Since there are fewer of them, each - in the most prosperous time in U.S. history - gets a bigger piece of the nation's economic pie than any previous generation ever got."

Life obviously failed to mention that this pie was only for a specific type of teen - namely white suburban ones. Latinos and African Americans were largely excluded from portraits of teen life because of the deep racism of the time and because they worked longer hours at a much higher rate than their more affluent white counterparts.

But otherwise, the teens of the late 1950s and early 1960s were fairly close to the teens we know today. They're also the teens that gave birth to the generation that became hippies, the first to engage in a modern multimedia protest against a war and government they considered unjust. They're the teens currently controlling our government, looking to return us to the mythic America described in that Life article. But they, like our teens, were once a serious threat to America with their party phone lines, their insistence on modern dance music like Elvis, and their seemingly bullheaded insistence on identity politics. Civil rights? Who had heard of those? So too will our teens one day go, from the vanguard of a shining future to the blackguards of a misremembered past.

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A Brief History of the Teen - MEL Magazine

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How two world wars and the industrial revolution created the modern teenager Most people point to Rebel Without a Cause, the seminal 1955 James Dean movie about youth rebelling against their parents, as the introduction of the modern teenager. But the teenager began long before that.

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a brief history of young adult literature - cnn

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A brief history of young adult literature - CNN

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With young adult literature regularly burning up the bestseller lists, it's clear many young adults don't need an excuse to seek out the written word.

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"TWILIGHT" IS NOT GOOD FOR MAIDENS: GENDER, SEXUALITY, AND THE FAMILY IN STEPHENIE MEYER'S "TWILIGHT" SERIES

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"TWILIGHT" IS NOT GOOD FOR MAIDENS: GENDER, SEXUALITY, AND THE FAMILY IN STEPHENIE MEYER'S "TWILIGHT" SERIES

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Fairy tales, of course, have been with us for a long time. Some of the earliest were written in a Neapolitan dialect by Giambattista Basile in Italy the early seventeenth century: Lo cunto de li cunti overo lo trattenemiento de peccerille (Neapolitan for "The Tale of Tales, or Entertainment for Little Ones"). These original versions of stories like Rapunzel, Little Red Riding Hood and Cinderella are more violent and more overtly sexual than the later versions. They were taken up again, made more respectable, and added to by the Brothers Grimm in Germany and also by Charles Perrault in France in his Mother Goose Stories.

Some of these stories, like Cinderella, are truly universal, existing all over the world in all languages from Zulu to Swedish, with slight variations: the glass slipper may become a grass one, for example, but in them, surely, we find proof of our common humanity.

Still, is this a good reason why we should, you might wonder, continue to read these old and, after all, often frightening tales (children lost in woods and found by a witch who fattens them up to eat them in Hansel and Gretel, or wolves chopped open by hunters so that grandma can escape in Little Red Riding Hood) to our little ones?

Yet it seems very important to me, perhaps even more important today, that these ancient stories should be repeated again and again. The violence within them is always contained within a satisfying structure with a reversal, and the requisite happy ending. Here good and evil are so conveniently and completely separate. There are no grey areas in the fairy tale. The appearance of the villain allows the child to freely project his own violent feelings onto these separate and satisfyingly wicked beings. Unable to express anger or hatred directly toward those adults on whom the child depends, he/she can displace this natural aggression and give free reign to it personified by the villain: the step-mother, the wicked wolf or the witch.

At the same time, having split good and evil so completely and satisfyingly the child can identify with the good hero or heroine. He/she can beat his way valiantly through the thick forest to rescue sleeping beauty or magically acquire the carriage, grand dress and glass slippers to enchant the prince. The child can identify with the small, the weak or the downtrodden (little Cinderella, sweeping the hearth, for example) who, in a gratifying reversal, is able to overcome the odds and triumph, marrying the prince. These tales thus permit both the expression of natural violence and at the same time preserve that essential part of life without which the child cannot prosper: hope.

This reversal which so often lies at the heart of any good story (think of Jane Eyre who ultimately marries Mr. Rochester, a damaged Mr. Rochester to boot, in Charlotte Bronte's masterpiece) is particularly satisfying to the small, helpless and completely dependent child. Here, in these ancient tales, the small boy or girl can through the hero/herioine triumph over the large and often dangerous-seeming adults around him or her.

Perhaps even more importantly, the fact that these tales are read or told by the very adults that the child both loves and fears enables this transaction to take place so comfortingly again and again within the safe perimeters of the home. There is something essential about the repetition of the same words which soothes the child, nurtures the imagination and assuages his fears.

So let us take up these ancient stories and lift our children and grandchildren on our laps to hear them once more.

Sheila Kohler is the author of many books including the recent Dreaming for Freud.

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Fairy tales, of course, have been with us for a long time. Some of the earliest were written in a Neapolitan dialect by Giambattista Basile in Italy the early seventeenth century: Lo cunto de li cunti overo lo trattenemiento de peccerille (Neapolitan for "The Tale of Tales, or Entertainment for Little Ones").

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LIST: THE 100 BEST YOUNG ADULT BOOKS OF ALL TIME

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LIST: THE 100 BEST YOUNG ADULT BOOKS OF ALL TIME

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With a panel of celebrated authors, TIME presents the most compelling, enlightening and influential YA books of all time, dating back to the 1800s

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I love psychology, and I love movies. Every couple of years, I teach a class called "Psychology in Film." When I tell people about it, they often ask, "Are there enough movies about psychology for an entire class?" My response is first shock, then slight annoyance, then my vocal response of, " Every movie is about psychology."

As my initial posting for this new blog, I'd like to focus on the "Twilight" movies (based on the books by Stephenie Meyer). In the past decade, the rise in popularity of vampire-themed books, TV shows, and movies has risen dramatically. While some vampire stories are rich with sexual and cultural lessons, the "Twilight" series, in my opinion, can be used as a display of behaviors that put people at risk for abuse in dating relationships. The popularity of the Twilight series shows just how much attention girls are giving to the examples of lovers displayed in Edward and Bella's world. To them, Edward represents the troubled soul who is waiting to be tamed by just the right woman; it's the modern "Beauty and the Beast." Unfortunately, the course and characteristics of Bella's relationship with Edward are actually templates for violence and abuse, and Twilight fans may unwittingly model a relationship that is far from healthy. While relationship violence is extremely complicated and every case is different, some warning signs have been identified by researchers.
Bella: A Future Victim of Relationship Violence
Let's start with how Bella, the main female character, displays three characteristics common in victims of violent relationships. The first and perhaps most obvious trait is her consistent low self-esteem. Bella constantly reminds herself that she's uncoordinated, unsocial, and unattractive. When Edward shows interest in her, Bella's low self-esteem puts him in a position of power over her; he can treat her however he'd like, because she perceives that he's out of her league and is lucky to be the dirt on the bottom of his shoe (or the blood on the bottom of his fangs, I guess).

The second quality Bella displays which is common in victims of abuse is that she is particularly attracted to men who are forbidden. Many readers of Psychology Today will be familiar with the "Romeo and Juliet" effect: Lovers who are not allowed, disapproved of, or are simply unattainable sometimes become even more desirable. Bella is thus drawn to the "bad boy" who is more likely to abuse her. Her interest in Jacob also goes up when he decides not to see her anymore (due to his sudden increase in hair and his sudden decrease in shirts).

Third, and most unfortunately, Bella is simply excited by violence, aggression, and danger; she finds it all thrilling. Bella's attraction to anything dangerous is clear in many cases through her human life. She rides a motorcycle because it's dangerous. When Edward tells Bella that he'll literally kill anyone who tries to hurt her, she's attracted to his violent nature. And, as anyone on " Team Jacob" will note, she's only interested in Jacob after she learns that he's a violent werewolf who might rip off her face.
Edward: Why He's an Abuser
Now let's take a look at the male "love" interest. Edward also displays many stereotypical characteristics of abusers. First, one of his hallmark characteristics is his control over Bella and his attempts to isolate her from others. Abusers often use this tactic as a way of ensuring that their victims have no way to escape should they attempt to do so. After he decides that he wants her, he's quick to get her alone, and for the rest of the series he constantly shields her from any other interactions, including from her father and friends. Edward consistently forbids her from seeing Jacob (a potential rival), and he even sabotages her car so that she has no avenue of escape. Not my idea of romance.

Next, the use of coercion to accelerate the development of closeness is another common warning sign of abuse. If an abuser can get full commitment from his (or her) victim as early as possible, this basically "locks in" the victim and cuts them off from escape. Once Edward and Bella have decided to be together, they spend every night together in her room, and he tries to follow her in others' thoughts (using his vampire superpowers) when she's not present. He proposes to her when he knows she's not ready and refuses to listen to her reasons for delaying the marriage.

Finally, a classic warning sign of partner volatility is high levels of jealousy or possessiveness. When Bella learns that Edward was only in Port Angeles (in the first movie) because he followed her there, she was appreciative for being saved from attack by random dudes, but does not seem to notice that it is stalking behavior. Edward continues to treat Bella in ways that mark him as a jealous, potentially violent predator.

Why is Twilight so popular? Since the Victorian era, vampire legends have been part of pop culture. These legends emphasize forbidden desires, illicit sexual metaphors, and adventure. Unfortunately, they also often include messages that support sexism and the abuse of power. In the case of Twilight, it's possible that the millions of screaming fans might be learning how to fall victim to a violent relationship.

For more information about relationship violence, my book "Voices of Hope: Breaking the Silence of Violence" is now available on Amazon.com and other major online bookstores (co-authored by Pamela Lassiter Cathey).

Copyright Wind Goodfriend, Ph.D.

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I love psychology, and I love movies. Every couple of years, I teach a class called "Psychology in Film." When I tell people about it, they often ask, "Are there enough movies about psychology for an entire class?" My response is first shock, then slight annoyance, then my vocal response of, " Every movie is about psychology."

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“Is He Still Human? Are You?”: Young AdultScience Fiction in the Posthuman Age

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“Is He Still Human? Are You?”: Young AdultScience Fiction in the Posthuman Age

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Project MUSE - "Is He Still Human? Are You?": Young Adult Science Fiction in the Posthuman Age

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Ostry analyzes science fiction texts, written for young adults, which deal with the tenets of the posthuman age: cloning, genetic engineering, prolongation of life, and neuropharmacology. She discusses how these texts use the possibilities of biotechnology as metaphors for adolescence.

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The Pervasiveness and Persistence of the Feminine Beauty Ideal in Children's Fairy Tales

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The Pervasiveness and Persistence of the Feminine Beauty Ideal in Children's Fairy Tales

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This study advances understanding of how a normative feminine beauty ideal is maintained through cultural products such as fairy tales. Using Brothers Grimm's fairy tales, the authors explore the extent and ways in which "feminine beauty" is highlighted. Next, they compare those tales that have survived (e.g., Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty) with those that have not to determine whether tales that have been popularized place more emphasis on women's beauty. The findings suggest that feminine beauty is a dominant theme and that tales with heavy emphases on feminine beauty are much more likely to have survived. These findings are interpreted in light of changes in women's social status over the past 150 years and the increased importance of establishing forms of normative social control to maintain a gender system.

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# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Pervasiveness and Persistence of the Feminine Beauty Ideal in Children's Fairy Tales

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This study advances understanding of how a normative feminine beauty ideal is maintained through cultural products such as fairy tales. Using Brothers Grimm's fairy tales, the authors explore the extent and ways in which "feminine beauty" is highlighted.