Coming of Age in Our Curriculum
The film High Fidelity opens with a close-up of a very melancholy Rob Gordon who poses the question, “What came first, the music or the misery?[…] Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?” A similar question could easily be asked of scholars of English. I have been asked the question several times each year since I first began teaching: “Why do we read such sad stories? Everything we read is so depressing!” I have done my best in these situations to cobble together a satisfying answer: “the most interesting stories often have the most at stake” or “defining moments are rarely happy.” For better or for worse, these responses seem to satisfy the questioners. I, however, am no longer satisfied.
At a summer institute two years ago, I was encouraged by a master teacher to scrutinize my own curriculum and consider not only what I was teaching, but also what students were learning. We claim to teach students how to analyze stories and to express themselves, but for teenage students reading bildungsromans and coming-of-age stories, what we teach blurs into a lesson I don’t think any of us fully intend. If these are the stories that demonstrate the maturation of a character, students are learning that they need to fashion themselves after these stories in order to become adults. They engage in a process of self-creation that is inherently coupled with self-narration: they seek to become the stories they wish to tell about themselves based on the models that we have provided. We are teaching students that pain is vital to growing up.
The goals of an English teacher are always ambitious and broad in scope: to cultivate active readers who are able to analyze and critique literature, to create articulate writers able to express an argument, etc. To cite the mission statement of the English department at the top school in the United States , The Magnet School for the Talented and Gifted in Dallas, Texas:
The seat of our discipline is simple: the conveyance of wisdom. When we encourage interaction with good and great works, our students have the opportunity to engage the authors and to gain wisdom that good and great writers provide. Consequently, our students begin a personal sorting of what is good and true within the expanse of written ideas, taking steps toward intellectual autonomy. Harold Bloom wrote: “Ultimately we read — as Bacon, Johnson and Emerson agree — in order to strengthen the self, and to learn its authentic interests.
This is a common theme across most, if not all, English departments. We teach students literature in part to help students understand themselves.
In Textual Power: Literary Theory and the Teaching of English, Robert Scholes applies Foucault’s theories of post-structuralism to the study of English as a discipline, specifically as an institution that seeks to self-replicate and is adverse to systemic change. He seeks to undo the maintenance of the oppositional binary between literature and non-literature in English departments. My concerns are similar. When we teach coming-of-age stories couched in the loftier hope of teaching students how to find and express their own truths, we are implicitly telling students how to come of age and how to tell the story of their own creation. The issue can be narrowed down to two popular features of most English departments: the “story mountain” or the basic arc of a story (as traditionally expressed in this diagram), and the Hero’s Journey.
The story mountain and the hero’s journey share a common trajectory. In The Hero with A Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell contests that commonalities can be found in cultural stories and myths around the world. It is the basic story of a hero. There are several stages: the call, crossing the threshold, the ordeal, and the return. In this basic form, the hero starts off at home, and he is relatively without power or abilities, but is happy, or at least content (hopefully like our students). Then, things go wrong and he has to leave (that’s the call). The hero (who remains unremarkable at this point), crosses into a new world where he finds a mentor, companions, and learns about his foe. He trains, is tested, fails, and then triumphs over his foe before returning home. If we consider the psychological and physical wellbeing of the hero and attempt to chart this journey, the hero begins safe and content, faces death and despair, and then manages to make it home (ostensibly transformed into someone greater than when he left). From contentment to trouble should be considered a negative trend, but look at the basic story chart:
Similar graphics abound in English classrooms. The concept is nothing new. The framework was originally proposed by Gustav Freytag in 1863, and it is known as “Freytag’s Pyramid”:
This seemingly innocuous graph implicitly communicates values to students. In Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson suggest that we actually communicate all the time with implied metaphors. For instance, we “build” an argument, we “attack” ideas, etc., and metaphorical structure and implied values can be seen at work here. We value “up” and “forward,” and conflict propels our character in that direction. It’s the “rising action.” We value peaks and ascension — we give primacy to all things “up.” Higher education, high-brow, higher-learning, etc. In our implicit valuing of up, the peak of the mountain is the goal, and yet the peak, the climax of the story is the most painful and dangerous moment for the character. On its own, this is just the skeleton of a story. When we focus our scope to consider coming of age stories, the implied values of the hero’s journey and our “story mountain” become a problem.
For a coming of age story, the hero is a child (or a teenager). The climax of the story is the final trial or culmination of conflict, the moment that transforms that child into an adult. In science fiction and fantasy, the hero defeats Lord Voldemort or confronts Darth Vader or casts the ring into Mount Doom. But in coming-of-age stories, the monsters are real and the pain — even fictional pain — is real. In a class for English teachers, we discussed common themes in our curricula, and “Loss of Innocence” was a theme explicitly addressed by a majority of teachers in the room in their own classes. That is ultimately the goal of the coming of age story — to lose the innocence that makes you a child. When we tell students that stories are driven by conflict, they often take us literally, and for good reason. They have been led to believe that pain and suffering make stories interesting and good.
In her TED Talk entitled, “The Danger of a Single Story,” the award-winning writer Chimamande Adichie reveals her awareness as a young writer:
Writers were expected to have had really unhappy childhoods to be successful. I began thinking about how I could invent horrible things that my parents had done to me.
Looking at my own curriculum, my students must come to similar conclusions. I teach Hamlet, which is famously violent in its epiphanies and moments of growth. I teach Winter’s Bone, the story of a teenage girl trying to keep her family and her home together as she searches for her father, who is a meth cook in the Ozarks who’s skipped out on bail. I teach The House on Mango Street, the story of thirteen-year-old Esperanza trying desperately to escape the poverty and abuse of her family and peers in a Mexican borough of Chicago. I also teach The Odyssey. If we examine just the conflicts and the actual crimes of the novels, we find rape and assault in three of the texts, murder in three of the texts, and traumatic experiences in all of them. These incidents would all be categorized by writing teachers as “plot devices” or complications. They are steps towards the epiphany and the culmination of the characters identity and their self-actualization as a hero. But at what cost?
I really believe Winter’s Bone is an amazing text. Ree, the main character, is remarkable. She’s intrepid, inventive, and she is fearless. She’s a great hero. However, I think it would have been much better if she could have just had a well-insulated home and grown up with adequate resources and been able to pursue a career in the military like she dreamed of doing. Batman is an awesome hero, but maybe it would have been better for him if his parents hadn’t been murdered in front of his eyes. He wouldn’t have become Batman, but then again he might have been able to save the city in other ways, while also managing to cultivate healthy friendships and find happiness.
We also teach progressively more mature texts. What texts we teach and when generally follows the same standards of movie ratings. Books and movies with more mature content are reserved for older students. It of course makes sense to limit younger the exposure of younger students to disturbing content, but I it also suggests that violent content is something to which children look forward to having access. You are rewarded with more graphic violence the older you get. When you turn 13? Violence and minor drug use. When you turn 17? Extreme violence, nudity, drugs, etc. When you turn 18? Well, you can vote, be drafted, and all content is now available.
If we combine this progression with the desire students have to be adults, to be more mature, we can see the thought process of some students:
Desire: I want to be an adult. How can I become an adult?
Repeated lesson: You grow up through conflict.
Inference: In order to grow up, I need to experience conflict.
This is essentially what several students have written in their journals and expressed to me in class. They honestly believe that they haven’t done enough dangerous things to write a good story or be interesting people. To quote one student: “I want to write great poetry, but I play it safe to much. I need to go out and make some mistakes.”
In the midst of all this, there is also the awareness that when processing pain, finding value in the growth and experience the pain provides is the perhaps the only positive element in otherwise tragic circumstances. I don’t mean to denigrate that in any way. Finding meaning in suffering has real value. But does that automatically translate into valuing suffering? Is our model for growth and development so linked to conflict that we can’t conceptualize growing or learning without it? What do we really hope for our students?
To return the Hero’s Journey, it is imperative that we question the framer, Joseph Campbell. In the The Power of Myth, which is the transcript of a conversation between Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell, Campbell answers questions about his theory of the monomyth and the power of myths for society today. Campbell reveals that his understanding of myths began with his Catholic upbringing, which he considered his “fixed stars on his horizon.” It is from this vantage point that he evaluated all of the myths that he would later study to form his theory. He claims that imperfection is what makes humans “lovable” and “interesting,” but he explicitly links these traits to suffering:
Campbell: It’s Christ on the cross that becomes lovable.
Moyers: What do you mean?
Campbell: Suffering. Suffering is imperfection, is it not?
Moyers: The story of human suffering, striving, living —
Campbell: — and youth coming to knowledge of itself, what is has to go through.
And so two heteronormative, cisgender, white, Christian, upper-middle class men are in perfect agreement that our stories are interesting because suffering is interesting and vital, and that’s what youths need to learn. They express variations on this sentiment throughout the conversation (youths today are lost; that’s why they graffiti, people marry for erotic love and that’s wrong, etc.).
I find hope in the works of Alice Meichi Li, and innovative illustrator who questions the differences between a hero’s story and a heroine’s story. The distinction she draws is fascinating: “a hero is striving to become a master, a heroine is striving for equality and normality.” She links the hero’s journey specifically to patriarchal values, explaining that:
“A hero is coming from an ordinary world and already knows how to play by the rules and has mentors and goddesses to help conquer any obstacles. A heroine starts a journey with disadvantages.”
Quite succinctly, she suggests the hero’s journey is a journey “of someone who has privilege.” I would go even further: the hero’s journey is an extension of toxic masculinity. And the coming of age story is simply toxic.
Every Wednesday, a senior at the school where I previously taught shares a “chapel talk.” They have ten minutes to share their beliefs and their story with the community. And almost every week, it’s the same story — it’s a story of pain. The foes go by different names: divorce, disease, injury, but each student, given the opportunity to express their truth, whatever it may be, chooses consistently to focus on the most painful experience of their life. That’s the consequence of our curriculum. It’s our fault for presenting stories in this way.
When I first proposed these ideas to a journal, I received two notes:
1) Reviewer #1:Certainly an innovative and provocative argument. Yet you offer nothing that will supplant the traditional emphasis on teaching conflict and its redemptive and indispensable qualities. I too would like to live a ripple-free life. If only…
2) The author’s concern with the idea of conflict is partly due to a problem in definition, partly a problem of choice, and definitely an inherent part of fiction that can’t reasonably be avoided.
To suggest that fiction can’t exist without focusing on debilitating trauma is at best a failure of imagination. We can do better. Yes, as those reviewers so condescendingly pointed out, pain and conflict are unavoidable. But how we rationalize and interpret those moments matter. By championing the hero’s journey as a model for self-narration, students attempt to shape themselves as heroes standing alone in the face of an obstacle. They look for moments of pain, and they almost celebrate the opportunity to incorporate these moments into their story. This is especially disturbing for students of wealth and privilege. Having experienced little hardship, students either fabricate, exaggerate, or seek out conflict to make their stories interesting. And those students who have experience real tragedy? While they enjoy sympathy, they also enjoy the most applause and standing ovations in our chapel.
The ugly underside of the hero’s journey is that it requires a villain. A hero needs an enemy, and students try to cast themselves as heroes they also seek fill the role of the villain in their lives, and that’s where the hero’s journey truly fails as a model. In the monomyth, the hero returns from the other world to be a leader at home. But our opposition in daily conflict does not go away, and we rarely leave. That bully that a student has to face? It’s not a dragon that you kill. That exam a student fears? There will always be more. And so while those reviewers seem to think that I am naïve, I think this model we are offering students is actually the more deluded. There is never a final victory; you will eventually fail, and sometimes when you fail you aren’t the better for it. But you are also never truly alone. You’ll need help. But do you need pain?
Works Cited
Adichie, C. (2009) The Danger of a Single Story. TED Global. Retrieved from
Bevan, T., Chazin, L., Cusak, J., DeVincentis, D.V., Greenspan, A., Newell, M., Pink, S.,
Simmons, R. (Producers) & Frears, S. (Director). (2000). High Fidelity [Motion Picture]. United States: Touchstone Pictures.
Campbell, J. (3rd ed. 2008) The Hero with a Thousand Faces (The Collected Works of Joseph Campbell). Novato: New World Library.
Franklin. N. (2014) The Hero’s Journey vs. The Heroine’s Journey: Rewriting Privilege. The Good Men Project. Retrieved from
https://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/heros-journey-vs-heroines-journey-rewriting-privilege/
Lakoff, G., Johnson, M. (1980, 2003) Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Scholes, R. (1986). Textual Power: Literary Theory and the Teaching of English. New Haven: Yale University Press.
TAG: The Magnet School for the Talented & Gifted. (2016) Retrieved from
U.S News & World News Report. (2016) National Rankings: Best High Schools.
Retrieved from
http://www.usnews.com/education/best-high-schools/national-rankings
Woodrell, D. (2006). Winter’s Bone. New York City: Back Bay Books
Yale University English. (2016) Retrieved from
