Schooling Ophelia: hysteria, memory and adolescent femininity

Abstract

In this paper, I analyze the theorization of adolescent femininity within three popular cultural texts about girls and schooling written by women and published in the United States during the 1990s. The books, referred to as Ophelia narratives, include Lyn Mikel Brown and Carol Gilligan’s (1992) Meeting at the Crossroads, Mary Pipher’s (1994) Reviving Ophelia, and Peggy Orenstein’s (1994) Schoolgirls. Drawing on feminist and literary theories informed by poststructuralism, I read the Ophelia narratives as alternative educative texts in which adult women use the figure of the hysterical adolescent girl to engage with knowledge about gender and sexuality. I argue that the adolescent girl, central to debates about gender and education in the 1990s, serves as a site of displaced self‐representation, where women challenge as well as reaffirm adolescent femininity as a state of injury. In this way, the Ophelia narratives provide an archive from which to examine the contradictory discourses of femininity that position the adolescent girl within curricular representations.

Notes

1. Liberal feminisms theorize gender through the lens of sex‐role theory, a paradigm rooted in humanistic discourses in which social roles are allocated to men and to women on the basis of biological sex.

2. Gilligan’s later work sought to address issues of race. See Taylor et al. (1995). See Griffin (1998) for a review of this work.

3. My analysis of Ophelia draws on Driscoll (2002, pp. 20–27). See also Gonick (2006).

4. For an in‐depth discussion of the similarities and distinctions between Foucault’s discourse theory and Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis, see Mills (1997, pp. 148–157). For an excellent example of poststructural feminist critical discourse analysis, see Lee (1996). Rogers et al. (2005) provide a comprehensive overview of literature related to critical discourse analysis in education.

5. See Gonick (2006) for a discussion of how these two discourses organize contemporary constructions of girlhood.

6. Men have also been diagnosed as hysterical. Freud referred to himself as a ‘petite hysteric’.

7. This construction of hysteria as the result of a traumatic event in the past draws on the theories of Pierre Janet. In addition, the link between earlier trauma and physical symptoms echoes Freud’s ‘seduction theory’. Freud’s early work on trauma suggests that hysteria resulted from earlier sexual abuse, a theory he later dismissed. For information on Freud’s move away from the ‘seduction theory’ see Masson (1984).

8. See Peterson (1998) for analysis of visual representations of Ophelia from the eighteenth century to contemporary representations.

9. Others have provided empirical evidence for what I am trying to argue theoretically. See Epstein et al. (1998), Titus (2004) and Griffin (2000). This debate about girls and boys in crisis continues see Warner (2006) and Tyre et al. (2006).