Abjection in Contemporary Australian Young Adult Fiction

Wilson, Kim

doi:10.21153/pecl2001vol11no3art1325

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Sad girls

Dennison

2023

Children’s Literature, Culture, and Cognition

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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.

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