Getting A Life

Catherine Driscoll argues in her recent book Girls: Feminine Adolescence in Popular Culture and Cultural Theory (2003) that the "girl is a figure for late modern culture," specifically a figure of psychological and cultural transition (108)... My specific focus here is on literary representations of female adolescent consciousness [and]... the predominant articulation of the adolescent girl as a traveler. As tourists in Zygmunt Bauman's sense, the adolescent girls imagined in [many contemporary] novels produce and secure their lightly-worn identities by measuring themselves against "vagabonds," who serve as alter egos against which the tourist's self "may shine" (93). Bauman suggests that the "hub of postmodern life strategy is not making identity stand — but the avoidance of being fixed" (89). The tourist, then, constructs an identity that can be easily and quickly shed in order to encounter other places and people as though inside "a bubble with tightly controlled osmosis"; the tourist's flexiblilty, Bauman suggests, produces a sense of control and freedom from obligation that forms an appropriate metaphor for subjectivity in our time (89). But some of us do not choose to be on the move and in fact are forced; "if the tourists move because they find the world irresistibly attractive, the vagabonds move because they find the world unbearably inhospitable (92). Here, I will consider the adolescent girl traveler in recent Canadian young adult fiction as a figure of ambivalence — of partial, even reluctant, geopolitical consciousness — in order to interpret these fictions in terms of how, in different degrees, they invest in, expose, and interrogate the tourist-vagabond opposition and the social heirarchies it implies...

In Jocelyn Shipley's Getting A Life, the tourist-vagabond opposition takes the form of a contrast, indeed an unbridgeable gulf, between white teenagers of different social classes. The main character, Carly, finds in her short-term neighbors — occupants of a run-down apartment across the street — a foil for her own trials. Carly lives with her unaffectionate, strict, responsible upper-middle class grandmother who, she discovers in the course of the novel, was primarily responsible for having Carly's mother hospitalized for severe postpartum depression. The spectre of her mother's mental illness and the seeming coldness of the actions of the grandmother and the father, is exorcised through the interactions with her neighbor, Dawn, who seems hip at first but later trashy, and Dawn's two little sisters, Skye and Amber, who are presented as malnourished and under-stimulated 'victims' of irresponsible single-mother parenting. While there is a good deal of complexity in the portrait we are given of the decisions and events leading to the death of Carly's mother in the psychiatric hospital, ultimately bad motherhood is placed in the realm of the psychological (and hence the icarcerable) and not in the realm of the social, where different kinds of motherhood might be sufficient, with adequate social and psychological supports. The fiction ends with the resolution of Carly's relationship with her grandmother and the disappearance of Dawn, Skye, Amber, and their mother as they flee the law after the two little girls nearly die in a building fire. ...