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Book Review by

The Journal of the American Literature Society of Japan 2005, No.4

YOSHIDA Junko, Boy's America: The Empire and Masculinities in Adolescent Literature, Kyoto: Aunsha, 2004. (Japanese)

　　Boy's America discusses American adolescent literature in the framework of Walter Davis's "American Narrative," focusing on the changing conceptions of adolescent "masculinities." With reference to Louis Althusser's idea about Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs), the book explores how adolescent novels or Young Adult novels, as a type of ISA, reinforce or resist indoctrinating imperialistic ideologies like Americanism, Globalism, and Exceptionalism without threatening the legitimacy of the "American Narrative": the hero's fight for freedom and democracy.

　　Since WASPy male characters embody the conventional masculinitiy in the national narrative, Boy's America explicitly addresses the "masculinities" of silenced Others. The book opens by exploring how Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1876-83) promote the "civilized" manhood ideal of Empire builders by depicting white heroes in their quests for male identity. Next, Boy's America deciphers codes of masculine anxiety represented by the male characters in The Wizard of Oz (1900) and demonstrates how the "noble savage" presented in Tarzan of the Apes (1914) serves as a "Darwinian" remedy for such identity crisis.

　　From a Great War era text, Boy's America moves to Cold War constructions of masculinity. In an analysis of John Knowles's A Separate Peace (1959), this study explores the connection between the "maturity" of the male protagonist, Gene, and the 1950s literary and political discourse of America's "end of innocence."

　　Finally, Boy's America considers several young adult novels associated to the counter-culture of the sixties and seventies paying special attention to their unique manners of resolving identity crisis. In Robert Cormier's The Chocolate War (1974), for example, Jerry resists conventional masculinity through the "chocolate war," and the novel ends unexpectedly with Jerry's abandoning machismo.

　　In A Wizard of Earthsea from Ursula K. LeGuin's The Earthsea Quintet (1968-2001), a dark skinned protagonist, Ged, confronts a shadow, the rejected part of himself, but finally overcomes his masculine anxiety not by killing his double, but by integrating it. All though The Earthsea Quintet, in fact, conceptions of manhood continually evolve in a way that ethnic, social, and sexual otherness is accepted. In Cormier's I Am the Cheese (1977), Adam Farmer fights a socio-political war waged against him in a nightmarish environment echoing the Watergate scandal while Walter Dean Myers's Scorpions (1988) traces the struggles of Jamal, a "fatherless" black boy, in his search for equality and a masculine identity outside the white national narrative.　　

　　The collapse of the national narrative is most evident in the Vietnam War narratives like Katherine Paterson's Park's Quest (1988) and Myers's The Fallen Angels (1988) where disillusioned and wounded soldier protagonists no longer believe in the rationalization of the war. To heal their wounded and confused masculine identities, these men seek reconciliation with femininity in larger society or in themselves.

　　Boy's America concludes by asserting that although the conventional masculine ideal has not collapsed altogether in literature or society, the inherent subversive tradition of Young Adult novels is encouraging.