Dragonsinger, by Anne McCaffrey (1977). Menolly, a musical prodigy, is outcast from her home, but finds a place in school where her gifts can truly be appreciated.
Jumper, by Steven Gould (1992). Davy uses his unique ability to escape an abusive home and have adventures and gain vengeance, but he finally must learn how to become an adult.
Both these novels are superb examples of the classic science fiction coming-of-age story, excellent for young readers and the young at heart. You wouldn't hesitate to give these books to a teen reader to help give them a love for the genre as well as a good foundation in it.
However, take another look at those one-sentence descriptions. For all the universality of the coming-of-age story, it's abundantly clear that Dragonsinger is a stereotypical female coming-of-age story, while Jumper is a stereotypical male coming-of-age story.
Dragonsinger is about Menolly's search for a community. In the end, she has friends she can trust and a place she can't be turned out from. It is focused on social relationships. Her antagonists are people who threaten her socially, whose tools are gossip and prestige. Her downbeats are loneliness and insecurity. The only danger she faces is being sent away.
Jumper is about Davy leaving home and becoming a man. That is, becoming independent while deciding what his ethics are. During his personal journey, he explores his power while he explores the world outside the home he left behind. He grapples with whether he owes duty or vengeance to his abusive, alcoholic father. He intervenes in terrorist actions to seek vengeance for his mother, killed by terrorists shortly after their reunion. The book is focused on exploration and adventure.
Those are the stereotypes: Female coming-of-age stories are focused primarily on building social relationships and finding a place in a community; male coming-of-age stories are focused on having adventures, operating independently, and developing mature ethics.
Sidebar: Superhero comics, the quintessential adolescent male fantasies, have been referred to as the "literature of ethics". As peculiar as it sounds, adolescent males are deeply concerned with ethics; that is, what's the right thing to do. I have no direct knowledge of adolescent females' concern with ethics, but I would hypothesize that male ethical concerns are generally fairly abstract, while female ethical concerns tend to depend more strongly on the particular people involved. That is, a guy thing would be "never sleep with your buddy's ex"; a girl thing would be about which one of your girlfriends and how she'd feel about it if you snogged her ex at a party, and how you'd feel about that, and how drunk you were, and what caused them to break up in the first place, and so on. Or I could be a jackass perpetuating an offensive set of gender stereotypes. It's hard to say.
The relationship between storytellers and stereotypes is complex, of course. Stereotypes wouldn't exist without their reification and reinforcement in story, yet it is often a mark of superior or innovative storytelling to challenge, test, invert, deny, or destroy stereotypes. Consider the recent profusion of female adventure heroes in genre television, particularly Xena and Buffy: Both occupy the stereotypically male adventure protagonist role; the former applies traditional male muscles and brawny personality to a female, while the latter takes the opposite approach, setting a dimunitive girly-girl in the role. Yet a third approach is that of the Charmed ones, who invert the process; instead of putting women into adventure protagonist roles, they integrate and absorb genre adventure into stories about the in-group and out-group relationships of the female protagonists.
Obviously, there is honor in doing a traditional story and doing it well. There's no difference between Dragonsinger and Jumper on the one hand and Harry Potter on the other in that. Still, as a thought experiment, what sort of changes could we work on the gendered forms of the coming-of-age story? The easiest is, of course, to put a female protagonist into a male adventure story. A significant part of Buffy is about Buffy's coming-of-age, cast in generally male tones: while her friendships and relationships are non-negligible, they are assigned the importance and roles of a typically male story. Buffy's boyfriends are conquests or appendages rather than lovers. Her companions are sidekicks, not girlfriends.
Similarly, one could put a male character into a community-building story. I suspect that examples beyond number exist in Japanese shôjo manga. To a certain extent, Harry Potter's escape from the Muggle world into Hogwarts is an example of a male character finding a place for himself, but this is textually overwhelmed by the male aspects of his story: gaining power, having adventures, and defeating antagonists. A more exact parallel would be a boy who bounces between his newly divorced parents, forced onto a soccer team with strangers; he has to make friends and integrate into the team while learning how to understand his new relationship with his parents. (Championship soccer game not required.)
Sidebar: Team-building is an example of a culturally-dependent story device. Western culture, particularly the American myth, exalts the individual. Strong male-type protagonists tend to emphasize their independence. Even the occasional Major League or Bad News Bears that focuses on team-building still emphasizes the individual nature of each team member. In comparison, Eastern culture tends to emphasize the group. Sports teams, exemplifying individual integration into the group, have a much stronger presence in fiction in Japan than in America. Whether or not there's a championship game, however, still serves as a gender marker for the story.
Take the same story, make it a female protagonist, make one or the other of the parents the soccer coach, and take the team to the championship, during which the girl protagonist learns how to take charge and lead the team, and you've got a male coming-of-age story in drag. Add a cheating subplot and under no circumstances worry about one's first kiss for extra pseudo-testosterone.
I suspect that hybrids rather than inversions are actually the more practcal approach--a championship soccer game and a first kiss. However, I'll also note that the tendency, at least in American genre fiction, appears to be toward granting female access to male roles, which mimics the general progression of American society. (That it took a long generation between the general breakdown of job gender stereotypes and the widespread appearance of female adventure protagonists suggests that storytellers inherently lag society, that they are restricted by the cultural environment of their youth, and that therefore the storytelling possibilities opened by a cultural shift are exploited only a generation later, when the storytellers who grew up after the shift have begun to tell stories.)
Posted by Greg at June 6, 2005 4:43 PM
Recent children's books often center on a gimmick which is meant to
appeal to both kids and those responsible for handing out praise and
awards for kids' books. Those latter folks are more likely to praise
something with a progressive message. The book might be about a kid
who's kidnapped to serve as a cabin boy on a slaver ship - adventure
for the kids, and an anti-slavery message for the appraising adults.
So, Greg, your suggestions about gender reversal in such books don't
get me excited because I would consider it another gimmick. It would
be nicer if the writer, instead of radiating all this progressive
consciousness deemed appropriate to nurturing the kids, tried for
something which would stand up to the same literary standards as
adult literature. Kids will pick up all this PC stuff in school, on
TV, on cereal boxes, etc.; but where will they pick up discernment
of literary quality?
There's market pressures, of course. Kids want to identify with the
protagonist, want the protagonist to be relatively cool and in
control, and if the protagonist is a boy, the likely buyers are boys
and they expect plenty of adventure; melodrama at a music school isn't
likely to go over very well. But there are children's books targetted
at both genders with more balanced "male" and "female" plot elements:
in situations with several children as co-protagonists, for example
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, boys tend to be placed in
social interacting and learning situations. If one of the children has
a character flaw, the young reader will recognize it and identify with
the non-flawed children who chide the flawed one for it. Through this
chiding and through the adventure at hand the flawed child can grow as
a person. All the children can be flawed in different ways and the
reader still will be able to identify with cool kids engaged in
adventure, by not identifying with the flawed ones when they're
exhibiting their respective flaws. But if there's just the one boy
protagonist, this complicates matters. There must be adventure or the
reader will be disappointed (since the reader isn't a girl wishing to
read about soap opera - she wouldn't pick a book starring a boy!) but
also the kid has to be pretty cool so the reader can identify with him.
That leaves less room for meaningful personal growth. Kids don't want
to read about kids who get improved by wise adults.
Coming-of-age stories are usually about middle or late-teenaged protagonists, and are aimed no younger than early teens. That's a different group than the kids you're talking about.
More comment to come.
That is an unusual definition of a coming-of-age story. If you do a google search on "coming-of-age story" you'll see lists of titles where the ages of the protagonists vary quite a bit. Coming of age doesn't necessarily mean arriving at the age of consent; it's "tales that capture the essence of the struggles we encounter as we mature" as one of these sites says. As for the ages of the kids who read them, it's more or less true for modern kids' books that age of protagonist >= age of reader. Kids are less likely to read about a kid younger than themselves because being younger isn't cool. Writers sometimes crank up the age of their protagonist a bit to ensure they aren't losing any potential readers.