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 Brown, L. M. and Gilligan, C. 1992. Meeting at the crossroads: women’s psychology and girls’ development, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) Meeting at the Crossroads, Mary Pipher’s (1994 Pipher, M. 1994. Reviving Ophelia: saving the selves of adolescent girls, New York: Putnam. [Google Scholar]) Reviving Ophelia, and Peggy Orenstein’s (1994 Orenstein, P. and American Association of University Women. 1994. Schoolgirls: young women, self‐esteem, and the confidence gap, New York: Doubleday. [Google Scholar]) 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.

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