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Emotion in Texts for Children and Young Adults: Moving stories
Edited by Karen Coats and Gretchen Papazian
[Children’s Literature, Culture, and Cognition 13] 2023
► pp. 130–151

Chapter 6
Sad girls

Melancholy and adolescence in Skating the Edge and Touching Earth Lightly

| Melbourne University
This chapter explores melancholy’s rich signifying potential beyond psychoanalytic frameworks. To do so, it explores its expression as a unique cluster of emotions characterised by sadness without a clear cause in both Julia Lawrinson’s Skating the Edge (2002) and Margo Lanagan’s Touching Earth Lightly (1996). In both books, melancholy girl protagonists are confronted with the death of a friend, mobilizing a journey towards happiness that is, I argue, emblematic of the way Western society treats girls and their feelings. Because girls are subjugated as both adolescents and women, their feelings – especially those deemed bad, unnecessary, or indulgent – are strenuously policed. Situating my analysis within discussions of the centrality of happiness (or at least its promise) to Western neoliberalism, I show how feelings that might be radical or resistant must be sacrificed in order to achieve ‘successful’ adult womanhood, marked by pursuits of work, romance, and happiness.
Keywords: girlhood, adolescence, melancholy, sadness, depression, suicide, mental illness, happiness, failure, queer, friendship, psychiatric institutions, Australian literature, young adult literature, Australian young adult literature
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • The pursuit of unhappiness
  • Girls and feelings
  • Melancholy
  • Melancholy and institutionalization in Skating the Edge
  • Melancholy desire in Touching Earth Lightly
  • The pursuit of happiness as the pursuit of adulthood in Skating the Edge
  • Achieving adulthood through queer disavowal in Touching Earth Lightly
  • Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 6 January 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/clcc.13.06den
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