Professionalization: Quick Questions for Job-Seekers

The academic year is over or winding down in most parts of the US and with it, so is the job market for the 2014-2015 academic year. Job postings are still popping up, at a slower rate than, perhaps, earlier in the year, but last year at this time I was still applying all over the place, hoping to hear back from somewhere—anywhere. This year I'm lucky that I’ve got a new position already accepted for the coming fall, so I thought I’d share a list of the questions that I’ve gotten in interviews in the hopes of helping out fellow job-seekers.

The questions below are compiled from four different interviews, all non-MLA & for teaching positions (1 interview was community college, the rest were for positions at small state schools). I’ve listed them from the most common to the most specialized/specific to the position.

Good luck!

1.      Tell us about your teaching. OR What is your teaching philosophy?

2.      What has been one of your successes in the classroom? What has been a challenge?

3.      How does your research relate to your teaching? OR How has your research prepared you to teach…[insert what the position is searching for]?

4.      What experiences do you have teaching diverse groups of students?

5.      What other classes could you teach for us? OR What upper-level courses would you propose for our department?

6.      Why would you like to come here?

7.      What else would you like to tell us about yourself?

8.      What questions do you have for us?

9.      How does your research relate to your teaching? OR Is there an assignment you do that relates to your research?

10.  What are some of your favorite texts to teach?

11.  What books or scholars have particularly influenced your research?

12.  How do you grade a student’s paper? What do you focus on?

13.  How do you grade the student at the end of the semester? How do you weight the grades?

14.  How do you engage in teaching large groups?

15.  For community college job: Why would you like to teach at a community college?

            What do you believe is the role and the mission of a community college?

Bearded Ladies Then & Now

This past weekend, Austrian drag queen Conchita Wurst won the 2014 Eurovision song contest with the song, “Rise Like a Phoenix.” Her initial performance at Eurovision sparked some mean-spirited commentary, not just because Conchita Wurst is the drag alter-ego of Tom Neuwirth (whose stage name “Wurst” means, not so subtly, “sausage” in German), but notably because Conchita performs in women’s clothes, with long hair, long eye lashes, plenty of make up and a full beard.

Of course, as someone writing about beards, bearding, and facial hair, I could not be more pleased by Wurst’s gender-bending performance and the fact that in spite of/because of her appearance, Conchita won. The importance of Eurovision as a song contest or a European unification event is debatable, though its political commentary this year, given the tensions surrounding the Russian presence in Ukraine and annexation of the Crimea, was undeniable. Still, it’s a big event with millions of people watching, so it gets significant exposure.

Front and center in these debates were the anti-gay laws recently passed in Russia. One of Wurst’s most virulent detractors was Vitaly Milonov, who was instrumental in writing the law against “homosexual propaganda” in Russia, and who petitioned for removing Wurst from the competition, citing that she was turning Eurovision into a “hotbed of sodomy.”

Luckily, Conchita herself takes a more relaxed view of the controversy. In response to a reporter who asked her reaction to the claims she was a “pervert” should leave the content she said, “I have very thick skin. It never ceases to amaze me just how much fuss is made over a little facial hair.”

A "little" facial hair or a lot, it created a lot of fuss.

A little facial hair, however, can mean oh so much, as I have already discussed here. To recap, facial hair and beards especially have been essential constructions of Western masculinity for hundreds of years. According to Renaissance historian Will Fisher, “facial hair was… ideologically central in the construction of masculinity.” To be male and adult in the Renaissance, Fisher argues, is to be bearded. In the eighteenth century, the beard becomes unfashionable—yet it is still made to matter.

The act of shaving became, in various places in Europe in the eighteenth century, crucial to the construction of Western civilized masculinity. Modern categories of race began to be theorized by eighteenth-century natural historians who linked male heat and semen with the growth of facial hair, further associating beards with mature, civilized masculinity.

A Russian Beard-tax token from the time of
Peter the Great, who wished to discourage the growth of beards,
which he deemed un-civilized.

The case of bearded women, then, was problematic, as they immediately put into question the notion of gender categories and suggested a problem with the established continuum of smooth and bearded faces. Jacques-Antoine Dulaure’s Pogonologia: or a Philosophical and Historical Essay on Beards, was translated from the French and published in England in 1786. The essay contains its own chapter of bearded women.

 

Portrait of Barbara Urselin,
17th-century German bearded lady playing a harpsichord.

According to Dulaure, “a Woman with a beard on her chin is one of those extraordinary deviations with which nature presents us every day.” He cites various historical examples of bearded women who were quite contented with their beards, including “a female dancer [in Venice who] astonish[ed] the spectators, as much by her talents, as by her chin covered with a black, bushy beard.” Surely this entertainer is the spiritual ancestor of Conchita Wurst!

Another proud beard-sporting woman cited by Dulaure was the “governess of the Netherlands… she had a very long, stiff beard, which she prided herself on; and being persuaded that it contributed to give her an air of majesty, she took great care not to lose a hair of it. This Margaret was a very great woman.”

While these women are perhaps deviations from Nature, Dulaure also notes that many ladies grow errant hairs on their faces and must pluck them. Similarly, Sarah Scott’s A Journey Through Every Stage of Life includes a cross-dressing character, Leonora, who finds herself under scrutiny by older women for not being hairy enough in her men’s attire.

Scott writes, “the Widows indeed, and some of the more experienced Matrons, looked with a Mixture of Scorn upon her [Leonora], and the antient [sic] Ladies especially, to whose Chins Age had given an Ornament that even Leonora’s Manhood could not boast.”

Even Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders remarks that, when considering cross-dressing as a disguise for stealing in, she is “a little too smooth-faced for a man.” The notion, then, of women more generally having whiskers is not unheard of in the texts of the time period.

In our own time and place, maintaining control over body hair is de rigueur. Even men refer to “man-scaping” and rebel from the constraints of socially-expected grooming habits during “No-Shave November.” Women who refuse to properly control their body hair are castigated or shamed. One has only to think of Julia Roberts being attacked in the media for showing a hairy armpit to see the backlash against female body hair. Though Conchita Wurst is a man performing in drag, her performance reminds us of how uncomfortable we are with people who break gender categories in such spectacular ways.

In the Pogonologia, Dulaure concludes his section on bearded women with a pronouncement that no doubt many contemporary folks would agree with:

“It is as ridiculous for a man to look like a woman, as for a woman to look like a man.”

Perhaps the discomfort some people feel upon seeing Wurst is that she embodies both sides of this

conundrum: she is a man who looks like a woman, and a woman who looks like a man. Her role as an entertainer gives her, to an extent, some liberty with her appearance. She, like the bearded ballerina before her, is an entertainer; her gender performance is part of a greater theatrical performance. Through her performance and her star-appeal, however, maybe she can draw our attention to the performative nature of all gender and the unruly body that contributes to and simultaneously undermines this performance.

Professionalization: Successful Conferencing

Going to conferences is an excellent way of learning more about your field, expanding your knowledge in a given area, getting inspiration, as well as meeting people who might help you in your research. More generally, they are important to staying informed of the direction in which things are going in your field, the major issues and ideas coming to the fore, as well as showing others that you are an active researcher.

All of these principles hold true for us eighteenth-century folk, and we are lucky to have some really wonderful conferences in our field. I have been to meetings of ASECS, Northeast ASECS, Canadian SECS as well as Southeast SECS, and each venture has been a success. In part, this is due to the fact that, as I mentioned in my previous post about this year's ASECS meeting in Williamsburg, VA, eighteenth-century scholars are, generally, a friendly and enthusiastic bunch. Additionally, we are well-organized; there is a regional eighteenth-century conference for several different regions in the US as well as several international and author-based conferences. Even if you only went to eighteenth-century specific conferences, you could still probably go to a different conference every month!

As an added perk, many renowned scholars in the field regularly attend these conferences. Rarely do you walk into a room at ASECS without recognizing the names of several people on their name tags from articles and books that you've looked up and read during your research. Of course, how to meet these people and get their help is another question.

Conferences can be daunting, especially if you are a graduate student or a junior scholar. ASECS is fairly large--over 900 people registered for the most recent meeting. How does one navigate a conference successfully? What does it mean to "network" at these functions? How can you still have a good time while you "work"? I've put together some tips here as suggestions for how to make the most of your next conference.

1. It's the people, not the topic. When choosing what panels to attend, make sure to pay attention first and foremost to the people on the panel rather than the topic. If there is a panel on a topic that relates to your research, but you've never heard of the scholars on the panel, it's quite possible that  the panel will be useless for you. Frequently, people present on topics that are new to them; it's possible that you may know more on the topic than someone who is new to it. If, however, you go to panels to hear people whose work and research you know and admire, it is likely you will learn more and gain more useful knowledge and insight into your research, regardless of whether the topic is in your specific area or not.

2. Be a friend, not a fan. When meeting scholars whose works you've read and admired, resist the urge to be a "fan" and compliment the person on past books and articles. Conferences are stressful for all of us, so during breaks between panels or at receptions, people just want to be friendly. Discuss books, movies, the restaurants in the city the conference is held in--but don't be pushy about discussing scholarly topics and research. It can seen counter-intuitive, but trust me, the best way to "network" at a conference is to befriend someone. If you really want to talk research, here's how to do it...

3. Bring up research at an appropriate moment. If you're desperate to get input on your topic from a star in your field, or you just want some face time with someone, there are a couple of different methods for doing this.
     a. Get someone to introduce you. Ask a friend, colleague, or mentor to introduce you to the person in question as someone who does "similar research." Usually this will lead the senior scholar to ask the junior scholar (you!) about what you do. Focus on your topic; again, don't seek to pander, flatter or be a fan. Pretend you are on the same level; remember: at a conference, you basically are.
    b. Approach the person after their talk. It is customary for people to approach scholars after the Q&A on a panel. If there is a line, this may not work. If the line is short, hang in there! At this juncture it's ok to tell someone you enjoyed the talk, it reminded you of x text or theory, or it relates to a project you are working on. If the person responds well, that can lead to further conversations, exchange of contact info, etc.
    c. Approach the person during a reception. If you attended someone's talk but didn't get the chance to talk to him/her afterwards, find the person during a reception. Introduce yourself, mention that you heard his/her talk, and respond to it in some way as in letter b.

In each of these examples, though, keep it brief unless the person you are speaking to asks you questions. If the conversation changes to other topics, go with it or leave and work the room....which brings me to my next point...

4. Go to the receptions and work the room. At receptions it is expected that most people will talk to a variety of people. The first time at a particular conference, you'll probably find a group you like and stick to them, but resist the urge to stay in one corner. This is why it's important to attend a variety of panels, especially your first time at a conference. At the receptions, work your way around the room, talk to people who were on your panel, on panels you attended, or who you recognize from other events. Don't be afraid to talk to people casually at the bar or to pop in and out of conversations. Everyone is doing it, and no one will be offended. If you are in a great conversation with someone, eventually someone else is going to interrupt. It happens! That's why it's important to follow my next tip...

5. Network after the conference, too. If you met someone interesting at the conference, you had a great conversation, you heard an interesting paper--don't let that experience go to waste, especially if you are intent on brokering new contacts and networking. Email those people a week or so after the conference. Don't email the next day, as many people have to travel and then catch up on work and family obligations. Don't wait too long, either, though, as you don't want people to forget you. The ideal time is about 1-2 weeks after the conference. Send a quick email, remind the person who you are and what you talked about, request a copy of their paper or bibliography or offer a copy of yours, whatever. This will help solidify your contact, even if you don't hear from or speak to this person until next year's conference.

Final thoughts: As important as it is to "network" at conferences, don't forget to make friends, too. Real friends--people you enjoy talking to and hanging out with, regardless of what they can "do for you." Remember that eventually senior scholars will retire; you need to have friends and colleagues from your peer group to hang out with, commiserate with, and keep in touch with. It will make your experience more fun (it's always nice to have someone to have dinner with!), more natural and relaxed, and help you out in the long run as well.

Conference Sociability & Sensibility: ASECS 2014, Colonial Williamsburg

This year's convention for the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies was held in Colonial Williamsburg last week, and, as usual for me, it was a great success. Of course, the fact that it was in a historically-appropriate location certainly helped; it was decidedly easier to feel that one had magically stepped into the world of the eighteenth century when just a short walk from the conference venue there is an entire village of reenactors wearing full-on eighteenth-century garb! (Cleveland last year was fun, but not nearly as atmospheric.)

Just a regular day in Ye Olde Williamsburg!

Like many conferences,of course ASECS can be tiring, frenzied, and frustrating. Unlike most other conferences I've been to though, I find ASECS also unusually welcoming, friendly, and fun, in addition to extremely useful for expanding my own scholarship and making new friends and contacts. This year's conference was particularly enhanced by the masquerade ball organized by the Women's Caucus as a fundraiser for the prizes the Caucus awards every year.

I don't think anyone knew quite what to expect from the masquerade ball...How many people would dress up? Bring masks? Be game for the merriment? Would anyone show up? I was curious as, I think, was almost everyone else. Personally, I've always been a big fan of costumed parties, so I knew I would go no matter what. Luckily, many people at the conference seemed to be of my bent, because when we arrived at 9:30 in the evening, the room was already half full, only to become fuller!

We're ready to have a ball!

There were people in all manners of costume, many from the eighteenth century and the Regency period, with a smattering of various other forms of costume, disguise and masque. Some people went all out with head-to-toe costumes (as, for example, one person came as Charles II, complete with buckles on his shoes, a long dark curly wig, and a stuffed dog to represent the King's favorite spaniel!), while others opted to add a mask or a wig or a fancy hat to a fancy dress, and that worked too.

I was pleasantly surprised to realize that in my costume and mask, some people really could not recognize me at all; at one point, I was even mistaken for someone else. The reason this pleased me was because it made me realize that our little experiment in eighteenth-century sociability was true to the original: masquerades allow one to become someone else, to go incognito, to trick people around us! Eighteenth-century novels are full of examples of characters who go to masquerades and talk to friends (or enemies) without realizing who they are. As a modern-day reader, these examples always seemed improbable to me. How could Clarence Hervey, for example, not recognize that he is speaking to Belinda and not Lady Delacour in the masquerade scene in Belinda? Surely he would notice the switch of costume! The ASECS masquerade ball proved me wrong--in a good way!

Aside from illustrating an eighteenth-century truism, however, the ball had another magical side to it: it threw all of us scholars together, without regard to seniority, age, gender or any other quality, and (with, no doubt, the help of a little alcohol) put us all on the dance floor together in a jumble of bodies and energy that made the conference more human and enjoyable than just about any other scholarly event I've ever been to. It was a reminder that we are all people, all wanting to have a good time, and, of course, that we eighteenth-century folk are some of the funnest and game-est people in the academy! Additionally, like an eighteenth-century masquerade, it also created a "world turned upside-down," where we could all experiment a little with who we are and how we present ourselves to the world.

Of course, there were other highlights to the conference. My paper on Catherine Vizzani and eighteenth-century dildo poems received a lot of great feedback during the Queer Transnationalism panel, which made me very happy. I reconnected with many wonderful scholars that I have met at previous conventions--and I managed to meet several more wonderful scholars whose works I admire and whose ideas have had an impact on my own scholarship. I had dinner in an eighteenth-century tavern, learned how eighteenth-century shoes were made, and bought myself some prints of eighteenth-century macaronis to put up on my walls. I walked the streets of Colonial Williamsburg, which, despite having an air of Disney about it, is beautiful and wonderful and, last weekend, was already showing signs of spring which seems that it may finally be arriving.

I could live here. It's adorable!

Cross-Dressing Ladies: Aphra Behn's The Widow Ranter

DARING: Give me thy hand, Widow, I am thine--and so entirely, I will never--be drunk out of thy company--Dunce is in my tent--prithee let's in and bind the bargain.
RANTER: Nay, faith, let's see the wars at an end first.
DARING: Nay, prithee, take me in the humour, while thy breeches are on--for I never liked thee half so well in petticoats.
RANTER: Lead on, General, you give me good encouragement to wear them.
--Act IV, Scene iii, Aphra Behn, The Widow Ranter; or, the History of Bacon in Virginia

Behn’s tragicomedy The Widow Ranter was her last play, and it was produced posthumously, in 1689. At the time, it was not a success on the stage. The dedicatory letter with which it was published in 1690 complains that “the Play had not that Success which it deserv’d, and was expected by her Friends; The main fault ought to lye on those who had the management of it. Had our Authour been alive she would have Committed it to the Flames rather than have suffer’d it to have been Acted with such Omissions as was made."
   Recent scholarship has suggested that the mis-production of the play, or even the fact that it hit the stage at the time of Williamite-Jacobite War in Ireland, does not completely account for its lack of success. Adam Beach suggests instead that it is Behn’s overly positive portrayal of the New World and the colonies, rather than the standard negative view of them at the time, that doomed the play. We might attribute, however, still other reasons for the play’s failure in the theater: its confusing plot, its romanticization of monarchical authority, its mis-representation of the real history of Nathaniel Bacon in Virginia, or even its somewhat misleading title, as the Widow Ranter gets very little stage time. This last fact is quite a shame, actually, as the Widow is a fascinating character: a smoker and heavy drinker who curses, fights and, as the quote above indicates, cross-dresses during the course of the play.
    Female cross-dressing was par for the course on the Restoration stage--and throughout the eighteenth century in England. The change in laws in the 1650s that allowed for women to take the stage altered the dynamics of performance. The idea of putting female characters into men's clothes was nothing new; after all, Shakespeare's Twelfth Night or The Merchant of Venice are only two or many examples of Early Modern plays that relied on this premise. The change in the Restoration, however, of having actual women play these parts meant that the female body could now be displayed in the scanty dress of tight breeches and waistcoat rather than covered up with bulky petticoats and dresses. Thus, the breeches part became an important component of the stage culture in the long eighteenth century. Aphra Behn's play exploits this trend--and complicates it.

Ann Bracegirdle as Semernia.

   For, in addition to the Widow's cross-dressing, which, in many ways, is quite conventional (she cross-dresses as a soldier in order to go searching for the man she loves, Lieutenant-General Daring, during the dangerous, final battle of the play), the play also contain the cross-dressing of another woman--the New World Indian Queen, Semernia (a fictionalized version of a real-life Indian queen who lived in Virginia at the time of the rebellion). Semernia cross-dresses as an Indian warrior (though how she achieves this is left to modern-day reader's and dramatists' imaginations) during the latter half of the play as a disguise so that she and her followers can elude the English. She, like Ranter, is initially so well-disguised that no one, not even her lover, can recognize her, and when Bacon and his men come upon her, (spoiler--sorry!) Bacon wounds her mortally. 
   Behn sets up these two women as foils for one another. Ranter, though low-born and coarse, finds money and love in the colonies. Her cross-dressing serves the purpose of literalizing her manly ambitions and mannerisms, while also, as we might surmise by Daring's desire to wed her while she is still in breeches, showing off the actress's body to advantage on stage. The figure of Semernia, by contrast, suffers through her contact with the English and her ultimate fate stands in for the fate of most of the New World Indians in the 17th and 18th centuries. Cross-dressing becomes not only the way to make these women mirrors of each other, but also to question issues of gender normativity, race, class, and imperialism. 
    Thus, while many Restoration and eighteenth-century plays put actresses in breeches either in breeches roles or in travesty parts (where an actress would play a male role), Behn's is one of very few (perhaps the only?) to portray a woman of color cross-dressing. One of the play's central themes is that of identity, and while cross-dressing proves one avenue for changing or asserting one's identity, the conclusion seems to suggest that the clothes one wears can never truly change one's essence.

To the Fair Clarinda: Imagining Aphra Behn

We don’t know much about our friend Aphra and her life (1640-1689), and what we do know is often contested. Unlike some authors who left us copious diaries or whose lives were documented by contemporary historians, Behn and her life are shrouded in mystery. She may have gone to Surinam; we’re really not sure. She was probably a spy for Charles II, Behn was probably her married name, and she was probably the first woman in England—or one of the very first—to make a living with her writing. We know she was a Royalist and a Catholic devoted to the house of Stuart, and the connection between her plays and political views are discernible in her works—although even that line of inquiry is often contentious.

            Even more uncertain, however, are her personal views on a variety of topics that she addresses in her works, which span several genres, from plays to poetry to novels and novellas. What did she think of the native peoples of the Americas? Of black slaves and slavery in general? Was she a feminist? A realist? An imperialist?

            Feminist scholars have held up Behn as an early promoter of women’s rights, a writer for whom the plight of women in the second half of the 17^th century was of utmost importance and critique. Her poem “To the Fair Clarinda” suggests that she may have been sexually fluid (I prefer that term to saying she was bisexual), and in this poem she seems to be writing about loving a hermaphrodite or someone who embodies the traits of both men and women. Her short fictions “The Fair Jilt” and “The Fair Vow-Breaker” and the poem “The Disappointment” each appear to clearly critique the stifling social expectations of women in Restoration England.

Charles II after his
1660 Restoration to the throne

On the other hand, Behn was also at the court of Charles II, a notorious libertine who enjoyed drinking, philandering, and generally having fun. As John Wilmot, 2^nd Early of Rochester and another famous libertine once put it in his satire against Charles II, “thy prick, like thy buffoons at Court,/ Will govern thee because it makes thee sport.” Thus, some of the more problematic depictions of women in her plays, such as in The Rover, are often chalked up to the playwright’s need to appease her patron. 

By far her most famous work, the novella Oroonoko, which takes place in Africa and Surinam and contains both New World Indians as well as African Slaves, is often interpreted as an allegory about the fall of Charles I. It is also often faulted for portraying a romanticized view of the tragic African slaves, especially those who were supposedly of "royal" descent in their native Africa, as Oroonoko and his wife Imoinda are. The white female narrator of Oroonoko is usually read as Behn's problematic alter-ego, an Imperialist Englishwoman who at once sympathizes with but also Orientalizes the New World and its non-white inhabitants.

The Widow Ranter, her play which takes place in colonial Virginia, was by all accounts a failure when it was produced (which did not happen after her death). It is also considered by many scholars to be a metaphor for the fall of the house of Stuart in the wake of the Exclusion Crisis. Others see the play as further proof that she really did live in the Americas at some point during her lifetime and that the play’s failure was less about royalist politics and more about the fact that the English just didn’t like or respect Americans, which Behn portrays in both positive and negative lights in the play. The Widow Ranter may be interpreted as having problematic portrayals of Indians while taking the presence of black slaves for granted as merely set-pieces of the English colonies. Conversely, we might interpret the play as critiquing precisely the issues that some scholars believe her to be complacent about.

Was she truly a "feminist," an abolitionist, an adamant critic of imperialism and slavery? Or was she making use of timely topics to make good drama? As a feminist scholar myself, I like to think the former, and I believe that the bigger picture of her works confirms a deep-running vein of critique of the treatment of women and slaves in her works, even if, at times, her depictions of non-white peoples are somewhat romanticized. In the end, however, I think that what makes her works so intriguing is that they seem to epitomize what Barthes would call a writerly text: we as readers construct the text as we read it, and the text and its meaning are constantly eluding us. It is precisely the contradictory elements of Behn’s oeuvre that make her so fascinating to read and return to.

What did she even look like?
This portrait looks quite different than some of the others.

“A poet is a painter in his way, he draws to the life, but in another kind; we draw the nobler part, the soul and the mind; the pictures of the pen shall outlast those of the pencil, and even worlds themselves” 

–Aphra Behn, Oroonoko

Eighteenth-Century Echoes: Strong Female Protagonists Then & Now

“Be sure don’t let people’s telling you, you are pretty, puff you up; for you did not make yourself, and so can have no praise due to you for it. It is virtue and goodness only, that make the true beauty.”

--Samuel Richardson, Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded

Mr. B & Pamela

Many of the most famous novels of the eighteenth century recount the tumultuous story of a young woman’s first entry into society. Pamela, by Richardson, often considered a turning point in the rise of the modern novel, is in many ways the prototype for this type of narrative. Pamela, and others like it, all deal with a young woman’s entry into society, her search for a suitable mate, her development into a virtuous woman, and the many obstacles that stand in her way.Works like Eliza Haywood’s  The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless, Frances Sheridan’s The Memoirs of Miss Sidney Biduloph (as well as its Continuation), Frances Burney’s Evelina or Camilla, and Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda, are all variations on a theme. A young woman without a suitable mentor or guide must navigate the treacherous social scene (often in a “debauched” place like London or Bath) in which she is constantly pressured to spend money, flirt freely, and associate with villains and rakes. She is put into situations out of her control, asked to make important life decisions, and influenced by those who want to gain by her naivete. A single wrong decision can dog the heroine throughout life (as in Sidney Bidulph) or it can be resolved through the help of friends and newly-discovered family connections (as in Evelina).

What these novels have in common with more recent young adult fiction is the focus on a young teen-aged girl as the protagonist. Having read the Hunger Games series, Ally Condie’s Matched series, watched the Twilight films (I couldn’t make myself get through the books), and more recently finished Veronica Roth’s Divergent, I was struck by the recent prominence of strong female protagonists both now and in the eighteenth century. (How strong they are is, of course, up for debate.)

Contemporary YA fiction has broken spectacularly into mainstream culture, starting most obviously (and pathetically) with Twilight. Twilight’s Bella is not much to write home about in terms of agency, but the series’s love triangle, which leads Bella to follow her heart and make some difficult decisions, has subsequently morphed into a popular trope in recent teen dystopian fiction. The Hunger Games’s Katniss is smarter, more interesting, and much stronger (at least physically) than Bella; she kicks ass, takes names, and has serious doubts about pursuing a romantic attachment during times of war—but the novel insists on throwing her into a love triangle situation. (Jennifer Lawrence’s rendering of Katniss has only increased her appeal, something Lionsgate undoubtedly hopes to repeat by casting Shailene Woodley in their adaptation of Roth’s Divergent, out in the spring.)

"J-Law" as Katniss in The Hunger Games film adaptation.

The idea of a female heroine put to various tests, thrown into a dangerous setting, unsure of whom she can trust, asked to choose between factions (quite literally in the Divergent and Matched series), given a makeover, and put in a situation where she must choose an appropriate (male) mate is strikingly similar to the Pamela trajectory. The stakes have not been raised, necessarily; they have merely been updated. Running away with Wickham was social death for Pride and Prejudice’s Lydia; for many of Austen’s contemporaries, social death was as bad if not worse than actual death. (…and in Clarissa, actually does end in death.)

It’s easy to guess why a teen-aged girl is such a titillating choice of protagonist both then and now. She is old enough to be sexy, but young enough to be virginal; her story is that of development but also of romance. Richardson’s Pamela and its various literary off-spring were meant as texts that taught young women how to behave, think, and feel. (Though it is worth mentioning that read today, Pamela seems rather voyeuristic, as we are asked to imagine Richardson penning various scenes in which Pamela is abused, undressed, and groped in the dark.)

Many of the novels by female novelists like Haywood, Edgeworth and Burney functioned not only to warn and teach young women (Edgeworth’s father was the author of various works on female and young person’s education and she collaborated with him on some of the projects), but also to expose and criticize the society that gave rise to the problems these young women would have to face. The novels function as social criticism as they illustrate the many ways in which society works against young women, forcing them to make difficult decisions that will affect their whole lives.

A Twilight publicity image
illustrating the love triangle that
split female viewers into "Team
Edward" and "Team Jacob"

Today’s dystopian YA novels have an element of social commentary, as is usual with dystopian fiction in general, but few of them challenge social expectations of women or gender norms in any real way. The love triangle set up by Twilight as the “standard” for YA girls’ fiction is so lucrative, that any author with visions of movie options would be stupid not to write one in. The romantic plot in these works often overshadows the more transgressive dystopian elements of the novels. The dystopian setting becomes merely a catalyst for love; the love story becomes the focal point of the narrative, as important if not more important than bringing down an evil government. In fact, in a series like Matched, the main character might never have joined the rebellion against the government if it weren’t because she fell in love with a social misfit.

On the other hand, today’s YA novels seem to encourage qualities like self-reliance, a high threshold for pain, sacrifice for the benefit of others, and self-confidence. Little girls around the U.S. are begging their parents for archery lessons so they can be like Katniss. Similarly, like many classic novels of growing up, YA dystopian fiction emphasizes the process of “self-discovery” and understanding what it means to be “true to oneself” and one’s core values—it’s just a shame that the biggest part of this self-discovery is figuring out which boy you prefer.

Most of the YA fiction for young women today is written by women; conversely, in the eighteenth century, both men and women put female characters at the center of their stories for the explicit purposes of educating young women (and, maybe a little, fantasizing about them, too). Consider Defoe’s Moll Flanders and Roxana; Richardson’s Pamela and Clarissa; Henry Fielding’s Amelia; Diderot’s The Nun; or Choderlos de Laclos’s Dangerous Liaisons, all of which contain female protagonists who are fascinating and complex. Now consider some of today’s splashiest, most popular and celebrated literary male writers: Jonathan Franzen, Michael Chabon, Philip Roth, Don DeLillo, John Irving, Stephen King…How many of them have written novels centered around the development of a young woman? It’s a bit funny to think that of all of them, King’s Carrie comes closest to that description. In terms of contemporary “serious” fiction, the teen girl is negligible at best, a joke at worst.

In the end, all of these issues come back to what we, as a society, understand teen-aged girls to be like. Both eighteenth-century and contemporary YA novelists seem to believe that teen girls are searching for a place to fit in, and that this fitting in is intimately tied to finding someone to love and to be loved by in return. While not a terrible conclusion in and of itself, it seems to indicate that our expectations of teen girls and the social construction of teen girlhood has not changed very much in 200 years. If anything, it seems that authors' approaches to these expectations has gotten worse: instead of trying to correct teen girl’s stereotypical behaviors, today’s YA novelists seem to cater to them, providing them with the kind of fantasies that Charlotte Lennox spoofs so tenderly in The Female Quixote.