Girls Transforming by Sanna Lehtonen

Author:Sanna Lehtonen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Published: 2013-05-01T00:00:00+00:00

Invisibility and Body Swapping: Intersubjective Construction of Feminine Identity

While invisibility is a common trope to address a character’s identity, it is more rarely connected with another popular transformation trope in children’s literature, body swapping. When invisibility is experienced by a character while she is in someone else’s body, it is framed rather differently. In Hurley’s Ghostgirl and Kaye’s Out of Sight, Out of Mind, the girls who have swapped bodies with the invisible girls assist the real owners of the bodies to get control over their invisibility as well as to construct new, stronger visible identities. As in The Time of the Ghost, intersubjectivity is crucially important for the invisible girls to gain self-respect, a strong sense of self and an agentic subjectivity—a subjectivity that has been deconstructed at the beginning of the narrative due to the protagonist’s invisibility. In contrast to the complex narrative of The Time of the Ghost, the novels by Hurley and Kaye are fairly straightforward high school stories that do not directly link invisibility with psychological experiences of trauma but mainly focus on the invisible characters’ lack of self-respect and popularity.

Hurley’s Ghostgirl involves a teenage character, Charlotte, who goes through an ultimate form of shape-shifting: she dies by choking on a candy but continues to exist as a ghost. While alive, Charlotte has been the geeky outcast girl in her high school, struggling for popularity by trying to look good and befriend the popular students in the school. Earlier ignored and bullied by others, Charlotte has spent her summer styling herself and crafting a popularity plan to re-model her subjectivity: “Instead of being forever etched in her classmates’ high school memories as the girl who just took up space, the seat filler, the one who sucked up precious air that could be put to better use, she was going to start off this year on the other foot, a foot with the hottest, most uncomfortable shoes that money could buy.”38 While she is aware that her transformation project is superficial, her metaphorical invisibility suggests to her that “all that ‘inner beauty’ sermonizing was a load of crap anyway. ‘Inner beauty’ does not get you invited to the greatest parties with the coolest people.”39 For Charlotte, popularity is all about visibility—visibility in the sense of good looks and cool appearance that guarantee recognition and admiration from others.

In her afterlife, Charlotte finds herself in a class of dead teenagers who have to come to terms with whatever has caused their death, let go of their earlier lives and move on. Charlotte does quite the opposite: she continues to pursue her quest for popularity and refuses to accept her literal non-existence that is, rather, a continuation of her metaphorical non-existence as an outcast before. While the death is depicted humorously for Charlotte, her own death is also traumatic: “Dying was horrible enough, but to die in such a pathetic and stupid way ... choking on a bear-shaped semisoft gelatinous candy was an indignity almost too much for Charlotte to bear.

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