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Apples and Oranges: Both are Fruit

  Jennifer Poduje

Jocelyn Van Tuyl’s article, “Somebody Else’s Universe”: Female Kunstler Narratives in Alcott’s Little Women and Rowell’s Fangirl” explores how two Kunstler texts, Little Women and Fangirl, depict young women coming of age and into their craft within the confines of social, familial, and historical structures. Tuyl argues how both protagonists find their literary voice through an “apprenticeship” of working with already published texts. This form of collage: layering, subverting, and negotiating published texts allows the protagonists freedom to compare, explore, and ultimately discover their own unique voice. Protagonists of each text face a dichotomy of loss and gain throughout their self-discovery, and their separate journeys become increasingly contrasted when viewed within the “contexts of love, family and education” (200). Tuyl demonstrates that through the journey of each protagonist, both Kunstler narratives implicitly value differing literary genres and their inherent worth (200).

Tuyl utilizes a close reading methodology of both texts. Through close reading analysis Tuyl reveals Jo and Cath’s individual progression and finality as writers as “Cath’s challenge is to reclaim her voice as a writer…opposite of Jo’s progressive muting” (201). She examines love relationships as stifling in Jo’s case, “Professor Bhaer condemns the sensation stories like the ones she writes, the woman promptly burns all of her manuscripts” and empowering for Cath, as “Rowell consciously inverts what Susan J. Fraiman calls “the myth of courtship education”: it is Cath who assumes the role of instructor” (201).  Close examinations of each text’s genre bending and “negotiation” lead to discoveries such as Jo’s need to change genres in order to write successfully, to even claim authorial status, while Cath changes genre from fanfic to realist fiction to “reflect not desperation but a claiming of authority” (205).

Tuyl examines both texts within the frame of a historical lens viewing how both Jo and Cath’s place in differing historical timelines greatly affects the literary outcomes of each protagonist’s successes and failures. Through this historical lens, Tuyl depicts each protagonist as a creation of their time, faced with limits and freedoms that greatly shape their respective journeys. The protagonists differ in their artistic motivations for working within the confines of published genre literature, as Jo writes to become “rich and famous…Cath eschew public recognition of her art…and revels in her anonymity” (200). Jo bends the rules within a set genre for power of recognition, while Cath bends the rules of her literary era for the freedom of anonymity. The historical context in which the author lays her foundational argument lends itself towards feminist themes within a social context. Jo is forced to navigate her authorial self in a way that does not diminish her obligations to family and husband. Cath is “wonderfully emancipated: she peruses higher education, faces no marriage imperative” and her gender imposes little constraint towards her journey as a writer (200).

Tuyl structures her argument through the rhetorical strategy of compare and contrast.  For every argumentative example in Little Women, Tuyl illustrates a comparative and contrasting element within Fangirl. Effectively creating a tennis match between the two texts, Tuly exemplifies how both texts are playing the same game. Both texts are analyzed in painstakingly close detail for every occurrence that illustrates their position in the Kunstler canon, proposing both text’s differences and similarities as validations.

The article is problematic in terms of its structure. The compare/contrast rhetoric does speak to the underlying argument that both texts are Kunstler narratives whose protagonist’s use published works to navigate their journey towards self-discovery as an author (compare), yet Fangirl does this by “reverse(ing) and replicate(ing) the structures that undermine Alcott’s protagonist as an author” (contrast) (200). Yet, the point of Tuyl’s argument gets lost in the literary examples being compared. The reader understands each given example at hand, how they are similar and how they differ, and therefore correlation between the two texts is clear, yet the overall correlation to Tuyl’s main argument remains lost. The reader is left to follow the trail of breadcrumbs and find the correlation to the original source: the argument proposed by the author.

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Reading Guide for Monster

-Jenny Poduje