| Articles: From Romance to Realism (1/7) | ||
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| 50 Years of Growth and Change in Young Adult Literature The Hanged Man Francesca Lia Block's The Hanged Man is equally angry but beautiful as well, in its language, its imagery, and its arresting ambiguities - in its art, in short. Unlike the other two, Block's novel is told in the first-person voice of the victim herself, a young woman named Laurel, like the California canyon that soars above the mean streets of Hollywood and that provides the green-flowering semi rustic setting for Block's celebrated Weetzie Bat novels. This time, however, "the sky is swollen and dirty" and the lush greenness is overripe and verging on decay, though Laurel herself, refusing to eat and living on coffee and cigarettes, is wasting away - trying to starve her emotions as well as her physical body. Part of the bleak darkness of Block's vision comes from the black void at the heart of her character's life, a space that - in a proper world - would be filled by the light of love. But through the violence of his physical abuse the father, who dies of cancer as the book begins, seems to have murdered his daughter's heart, to have destroyed any opportunity for joy and fulfillment to flower there. "I will be thin and pure," she thinks, "like a glass cup. Empty. Pure as light" He has also murdered her womanhood - she no longer has her period - and has left her obsessed, as her mother is obsessed with cleaning and purifying. Both teeter on the brink of madness, a condition of being that blurs the line between dream and reality; the mother, for example, sees white moths everywhere and thinks they are they are the spirit of her dead husband. This particular image invokes the spirit of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and the magical realism that enriches the Weetzie Bat books, although Block told me in a recent interview that there is more of the authentic fairy-tale ethos in this book than of magical realism - the grim fairy tale, that is, full of darkness, danger, violence, and passion. There are echoes, too, of Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber and Other Adult Tales (Harper, 1979) and its infusion of masculine abuse and sexuality into the world of fairy tales. Consider that Laurel says, "I feel like Hansel and Gretel." Her mother calls herself a gypsy witch, and the daughter thinks of both her and the mother of a friend as being witches (the equation of the witch with womanhood, nature, and the wildness is also an operative factor here, according to Block; note, too, that later in the book Laurel describes herself and her friend Claudia as "riding the tree like witches on brooms" [they're sitting astride the branch of a eucalyptus tree].) Laurel's bedroom is in a castle like tower into which her lover climbs at night like the swain in Rapunzel, perhaps; a clown at Venice Beach paints Laurel's dreams on her face; Laurel makes love in the ruins of the magician Houdini's house; she divines the truth about people by equating them with characters from the magical tarot deck and sees herself as the Hanged Man, a figure that symbolizes renunciation and self-deprivation (she denies herself food, remember) and is suspended in illusion. |
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