Abstract
The Outsiders if often credited with marking the emergence of YA literature. It was written by a teenager and was intended to represent honestly the difficult lives of other young adults. Despite the novel’s audience and purpose and its potentially provocative acknowledgment of the problems of social class, The Outsiders was readily institutionalized as part of school reading lists and educational curricula throughout the United States. Its institutionalization can be accounted for in part by the way it offers a palliative to the problems it depicts. The protagonist, Ponyboy, represents the novel itself as an intervention into those problems, but it works to reaffirm a notion of rugged individualism and a faith in American education. Such lessons ultimately disarm the novel’s class critique and render it safe for educational institutions.
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Notes
In an article for The New York Times in which she explains her project in The Outsiders, Hinton is actually critical of the ways realism is represented as simply a collection of problems. “Adults who try to write realistically seem to mix up the real with the dirty,” she writes (“Teen-agers” 1967, p. 27). Ironically, though, her novel can be seen as fueling precisely this way of coding realism in fiction for young adults.
As Raymond Williams writes, “In Marx the process is seen as the history of labour, in which man creates himself by creating his world, but in class-society is alienated from this essential nature by specific forms of alienation in the division of labour, private property and the capitalist mode of production in which the worker loses both the product of this labour and his sense of his own productive activity, following the expropriation of both by capital” (1976, p. 35).
Incidentally, I would reserve the term “problem novel” for those texts in which a single problem or closely related set of problems more thoroughly dominates and constrains the narrative, plot, and characterization. Beverly Cleary’s Dear Mr. Henshaw about a boy dealing with his parents’ divorce and Judy Blume’s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret about a girl’s physical development and choice of religion are examples.
There are no doubt examples of readers who have been moved to action by reading The Outsiders. Michelle Inderbitzen, a sociologist specializing in juvenile justice, has published an account of how the novel influenced her. “The idea of justice did not become part of my consciousness until I read S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders,” she writes (2003, p. 357). Evidence of the multiplicity of possible reader relations is Inderbitzen’s explanation that her sister, who had passed along the book to her years before, had little recollection of either the recommendation or the story itself.
These limitations are not necessarily unique to The Outsiders, but this text stands in possible contrast to one like Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate War (1974). The latter novel has proved quite successful at raising questions (about its appropriateness for young adults, its merit, its desirability as a representation of the world, etc.) and provoking outrage. This is clear from the fact that it ranks as one of the most frequently challenged books of the past three decades. It is listed as the fourth most frequently challenged book of the 1990s, and it tops the list of challenged books for 2004. See http://www.ala.org/ala/oif/bannedbooksweek/bannedbooksweek.htm. At 43rd on the list of most frequently challenged books of the 1990s, The Outsiders has proved far less controversial, although it has encountered controversy over its violent content and the fact that the boys come from broken homes (Gabler & Gabler, 1997, p. 354).
See also, for example, Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis’s Schooling in Capitalist America and Bowles’s “Unequal Education and the Reproduction of the Social Division of Labor.”
One cannot ignore also that what would become the highest-paying occupations, like the practice of medicine, were professionalizing over the course of the nineteenth century, constituting rules and requirements for certification and practice, and that lengthy and costly education could be used as one way to limit membership in these professions. Far from being a solution to the problem of social class, education could be used to reinforce and maintain distinctions. See, for instance, Paul Starr’s The Social Transformation of American Medicine for an account of this process of professionalization.
This alternative reading of “stay gold” was suggested to me by one of the anonymous readers of this essay. Both readers provided tremendously useful and thorough comments, which I appreciated.
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Tribunella, E.L. Institutionalizing The Outsiders: YA Literature, Social Class, and the American Faith in Education. Child Lit Educ 38, 87–101 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-006-9016-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-006-9016-2