Cover not available
Part of
Emotion in Texts for Children and Young Adults: Moving stories
Edited by Karen Coats and Gretchen Papazian
[Children’s Literature, Culture, and Cognition 13] 2023
► pp. 130–151

Chapter 6
Sad girls

Melancholy and adolescence in Skating the Edge and Touching Earth Lightly

| Melbourne University
This chapter explores melancholy’s rich signifying potential beyond psychoanalytic frameworks. To do so, it explores its expression as a unique cluster of emotions characterised by sadness without a clear cause in both Julia Lawrinson’s Skating the Edge (2002) and Margo Lanagan’s Touching Earth Lightly (1996). In both books, melancholy girl protagonists are confronted with the death of a friend, mobilizing a journey towards happiness that is, I argue, emblematic of the way Western society treats girls and their feelings. Because girls are subjugated as both adolescents and women, their feelings – especially those deemed bad, unnecessary, or indulgent – are strenuously policed. Situating my analysis within discussions of the centrality of happiness (or at least its promise) to Western neoliberalism, I show how feelings that might be radical or resistant must be sacrificed in order to achieve ‘successful’ adult womanhood, marked by pursuits of work, romance, and happiness.
Keywords: girlhood, adolescence, melancholy, sadness, depression, suicide, mental illness, happiness, failure, queer, friendship, psychiatric institutions, Australian literature, young adult literature, Australian young adult literature
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • The pursuit of unhappiness
  • Girls and feelings
  • Melancholy
  • Melancholy and institutionalization in Skating the Edge
  • Melancholy desire in Touching Earth Lightly
  • The pursuit of happiness as the pursuit of adulthood in Skating the Edge
  • Achieving adulthood through queer disavowal in Touching Earth Lightly
  • Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 6 January 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/clcc.13.06den
References (39)
References
Primary sources
Lanagan, Margo. 1996. Touching Earth Lightly. St. Leonards: Allen & Unwin.Google Scholar
Lawrinson, Julia. 2002. Skating the Edge. Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press.Google Scholar
Secondary sources
Aapola, Sinikka, Marnina Gonick, & Anita Harris. 2005. Young Femininity: Girlhood, Power, and Social Change. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Ahmed, Sara. 2010. The Promise of Happiness. Durham: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Bakan, David. 1971. Adolescence in America: From Idea to Social Fact. Daedalus 100.4: 979–95.Google Scholar
Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Bradford, Clare. 1999. Embodied Subjectivities: Female-Authored Texts and Female Friendships. In Something to Crow About: New Perspectives in Literature for Young People. Sue Clancy and David Gilbey (eds), 109–117. Wagga Wagga, NSW: Centre for Information Studies, Charles Sturt University.Google Scholar
Coats, Karen. 2000. Abjection and Adolescent Fiction. Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society 5.2: 291–301.Google Scholar
. 2004. Looking Glasses and Neverlands: Lacan, Desire, and Subjectivity in Children’s Literature. Des Moines: University of Iowa Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Côté, James E. 2014. Youth Studies: Fundamental Issues and Debates. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Flatley, Jonathan. 2008. Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Graham, Philip. 2004. The End of Adolescence. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Griffin, Christine. 1993. Representations of Youth: The Study of Youth and Adolescence in Britain and America. Cambridge: Polity Press.Google Scholar
Halberstam, Jack (as Judith). 2011 The Queer Art of Failure. Durham: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Harris, Anita. 2004. Future Girl: Young Women in the Twenty-First Century. London: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Harris, Joanna. 1999. Good Girls Don’t: Gender Ideologies in Touching Earth Lightly and Wolf. Papers: Explorations into Children’s Literature 9.1: 41–50. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jackson, Stanley W. 1986. Melancholia and Depression: From Hippocratic Times to Modern Times. New Haven: Yale University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
James, Kathryn. 2006. Over Her Dead Body: Expelling the Monstrous-Feminine in Touching Earth Lightly. Papers: Explorations into Children’s Literature 16.1: 25–32.Google Scholar
Kokkola, Lydia. 2013. Fictions of Adolescent Carnality: Sexy Sinners and Delinquent Deviants. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lamb, Sharon. 2001. The Secret Lives of Girls. New York: Free Press.Google Scholar
Marshall, Elizabeth. 2007. Schooling Ophelia: Hysteria, Memory and Adolescent Femininity. Gender and Education 19.6: 707–728. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
McCormack, Anna Beth. 2002. “A Song in Search of a Voice That Is Silent”: Feminist Readings of When She Hollers and Touching Earth Lightly. Papers: Explorations into Children’s Literature 12.3: 28–34. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
McInally, Kathryn. 2007. (Queer) Deleuzian Readings of Desire in Australian Young Adult Fiction. PhD diss., Deakin University.
Miller, Michelle. 2017. Theorizing “The Plunge”: (Queer) Girls’ Adolescence, Risk, and Subjectivity in Blue Is the Warmest Colour. Girlhood Studies 10.1: 39–54.Google Scholar
Ngai, Sianne. 2005. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University PressGoogle Scholar
Pedwell, Carolyn and Anne Whitehead. 2012. Affecting Feminism: Questions of Feeling in Feminist Theory. Feminist Theory 13.2: 115–129. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pipher, Mary. 2005. Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls. New York: Riverhead Books.Google Scholar
Radden, Jennifer. 2000. The Nature of Melancholy: From Aristotle to Kristeva. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Sercombe, Howard. 1999. Boots, Gangs and Addictions: Youth Subcultures and the Media. Australian Youth Subcultures, Rob White (ed), 5–15. Hobart: Australian Clearinghouse for Youth Studies.Google Scholar
Siddall, Jane. 2003. Mother What Art Thou?: A Study of the Depiction of Mother Figures in Recent Australian and New Zealand Fiction for Teenagers. PhD diss., Edith Cowan University.
Strzepek, Katy. 2015. Stop Saving the Girl? Pedagogical Considerations for Transforming Girls’ Studies. Difficult Dialogues about Twenty-First-Century Girls. Donna Marie Johnson and Alice E. Ginsberg (eds), 123–143. New York: SUNY Press.Google Scholar
Thurschwell, Pamela. 2012. Dead Boys and Adolescent Girls: Unjoining the Bildungsroman in Carson McCullers’s The Member of the Wedding and Toni Morrison’s Sula. English Studies in Canada 38.3/4: 105–128. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tribunella, Eric L. 2010. Melancholia and Maturation: The Use of Trauma in American Children’s Literature. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.Google Scholar
Trites, Roberta Seelinger. 2000. Disturbing the Universe: Power and Repression in Adolescent Literature. Des Moines, Iowa: University of Iowa Press.Google Scholar
Westwater, Martha. 2000. Giant Despair Meets Hopeful: Kristevan Readings in Adolescent Fiction. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press.Google Scholar
Wheatley, Nadia. 1999. Including Them Out: Working-Class Characters in Contemporary Australian Young Adult Fiction. Overland 157: 40–45.Google Scholar
Wilson, Eric G. 2009. Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.Google Scholar
Wilson, Kim. 2001. Abjection in Contemporary Australian Young Adult Fiction. Papers: Explorations into Children’s Literature 11.3: 24–31. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Woodward, Kathleen. 2002. Statistical Panic: Cultural Politics and Poetics of the Emotions. Durham: Duke University Press.Google Scholar