영미 청소년문학, 영어교육, 그리고 검열

Young Adult Literature, English Education, and Censorship:the Quest for Masculinity in A Separate Peace and when Jeff comes Home

This paper compares John Knowles's A Separate Peace with Catherine Atkins's when Jeff comes Home in terms of masculinity the atuthors try to depict through their adolescent males' 'coming of ages.' These young adult novels have been the objects of censorship by parents, who have insisted to exempt these two novels from the high school syllabi for the reason of negative attitude of life and homosexual implications of the novels. The paper, however, contends that, despite the homosexual potential in friendship, a Separate Peace is the reaffirmation of the traditional American cultural values of masculinity and heterosexuality. In the process of discussing the homosexual potential between the major characters, Ginn and Finny in A Separate Peace, Judith Butler's theory of melacholia is appropriated for the imterpretation of the protagonist, Ginn's dual attitudes toward his best friend's accident. Meanwhile, Catherine Atkins is more subversive in that she depicts 16-year-old adolescent male as a victim of kidnapping and rape. Jeff, the muscular sportsman in the campus, is put in the position of 'social woman', the moment he becomes the victim of rape. His fear and confusion of his sexual identity is his fear of 'womanization.' Rape here is not just violence but becomes a 'gendered' concept. Since Jeff's muscular body and talendt for sports do not make him a typical victim, his classmates classify him as a voluntary homosexual. By re- casting the rape novel with a male victim, Atkins challenges the typical masculinity and confronts our common ideas of a world in which women are victims and men are victimizers.