Abstract
This paper explores the subversion of the bildungsroman in the young adult novel, Surrender (Penguin, Camberwell, 2005), by the Australian author, Sonya Hartnett. It is suggested that, in reinscribing the traditional bildungsroman within a Gothic discourse, this novel reveals the effect on subjectivity that the horrors of postmodernity pose for the contemporary adolescent. The employment of Gothic tropes to depict the journey of the narrator, Anwell, highlights the trauma of locating an agentic subject position in a context where authoritative social institutions have been revealed as corrupt. In such a world, typical pathways to agency are problematised. Traditional bildungsroman novels suggest agency is attained by finding one’s place in the world, most often in accordance with socially prescribed schemata, although some contemporary examples confer agency through rebellion or resistance instead. Surrender posits a controversial alternative, suggesting that embracing abjection and, ultimately, death, may be considered a legitimate—if transgressive—form of agency for the othered adolescent. Rather than finding a place in the world that Anwell sees as having failed him, he demonstrates a subversive form of agency in choosing to escape from this world entirely.
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Notes
In doing so, Beville reconsiders Fred Botting’s definition of the Gothic as arising from a particular historical context: the “despairing ecstasies of Romantic idealism and individualism and the uncanny dualities of Victorian realism and decadence” (Beville, 2009, p. 39).
The peculiarly Australian version of the Gothic is outlined by Gerry Turcotte (2009) in The Kangaroo Gargoyles: Footnotes to an Australian Gothic Script. He suggests that the Gothic was ripe for transplantation to Australia, initially to represent the uncanny colonial experience and, later, to address the psychic haunting of the landscape arising from institutionalised mistreatment of both the landscape and its indigenous peoples.
It should be noted that Alice Mills is referring here to Garth Nix’s Tower series. Her argument suggests the failure of the protagonist’s Oedipal journey results in his failure to move beyond an uncanny and liminal iteration of selfhood. In discussing what she refers to as “a sword and sorcery tale with Gothic trappings” (p. 154), Mills highlights the versatility of such Gothic tropes to foreground the uncanny nature of adolescence and the failure of some to escape its condition.
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Adam Kealley is a PhD candidate studying under a collaborative arrangement between Curtin University, Bentley, Australia and The University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, Scotland.
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Kealley, A. Escaping Adolescence: Sonya Hartnett’s Surrender as a Gothic Bildungsroman for the Twenty-first Century. Child Lit Educ 48, 295–307 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-017-9331-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-017-9331-9