The construction of ‘the child’, ‘childhood’, ‘adolescence’, ‘adulthood’ and
‘growing up’
in The
Children of the King and Throne of Glass
The concepts
of childhood and adolescence represented through the structural development of
characters in the two novels Throne of Glass (2012) by Sarah
J. Maas and The Children of the King (2012) by Sonya Hartnett.
This comparative essay highlights the differences and similarities of these two
novels in relation to the ideas of childhood and adolescence. Both novels
affirm that childhood and adolescence are intrinsically social constructions
and thus subject to history and culture. This essay posits that the novels
represent childhood and adolescence as utterly complex ideas.
Nevertheless, The Children of the King shows that children are
vulnerable and that they need adults to be concerned about them and provide
protection. Including the representation of childhood as a subordinate to
adults, the novel also explores childhood within the direct experience of the
child in his or her confrontation with war and being exposed to the broader
narrative of history. In contrast, Throne of Glass constructs
the idea of adolescence in relation to the fantastic potential of the teenage
heroine, who in spite of being extraordinary and having full command over her destiny,
suffers the anxiety of loneliness.
The Children
of the King narrates
the story of two siblings, Cecily Lockwood, and Jeremy Lockwood, who are sent
from London to a safe English countryside during the bombings of World War II.
A third teenager called May joins Cecily and Jeremy. They are resettled in
Uncle Peregrine’s house, Heron Hall. The story seems to be developing on a
linear plot until May discovers a pair of mysterious teenage boys taking asylum
in the nearby ruins of Snow Castle. Although later Uncle Peregrine recounts the
story of that historical stronghold, it is May who first discovers the boys in
the castle. Through Peregrine’s narration about the castle, which he describes
“as hard as winter” (Hartnett, 2012, p. 60), the children listen to a
five-century-old story of power and brutality. As Miller mentions, the “double
temporal frame provides a context for enabling [children] to mature and to take
up strengthened subject positions” (2015, p. 40). Therefore, the direct
exploration of children from historical conflicts becomes relevant to their
current lives, their experience of childhood. In his attempt to define the
purpose of the historical novel, Cannadine argues that “they are novels which
find it easiest to address present-day concerns by putting them in a past
context” (Cannadine quoted in Watkins, 2005, p. 52). Likewise, the novel
represents childhood within a reflection upon the history that blends their
contemporary concerns with the past. The children who are running away from a
particular war are about to understand the overall concept of conflicts to a
larger extent of history.
The Children of the King reflects the traditional and conventional attitudes about childhood
in which a child is seen to be vulnerable. This is a primary demonstration of
childhood at the outset of the story; nevertheless, the novel constructs the
concept of childhood that has various qualities such as curiosity and naivety.
Hartnett begins to emphasise the influence of
adults as children’s guardians in the process of growing up. When Cecily asks
her father, “will we die?” (Hartnett, 2012, p. 8), Humphrey replies: “No, […].
You’re going on a holiday” (p. 8). Through depicting the parent’s attention
towards the safety of the children, the novel implies the conventional and
traditional attitudes, whereby, “the child was perceived as a delicate creature
who must be protected” (Shavit, 1999, p. 321). The delicacy of children
requires them to be guarded by the adult, but in The Children of the
King, Jeremy takes a risk and runs away back to London by himself, which is
a rejection of protection. Although Jeremy thinks naively about the war, the
novel represents the child having curiosity alongside vulnerability. Hartnett
underpins The Children of the King on the natural requirement
of protection and the contradictory features of the child to pave the way for
further construction of the idea of childhood throughout the novel.
Unlike the
initial representation of the child as the one to be protected by the adult
in The Children of the King, the novel Throne of
Glass represents the adolescent as the character who does not merely
need adult protection but possesses the finest potential to be the King's
champion. The principal female character, Celaena Sardothien, is a
tough heroine and the most feared assassin at the time. Celaena is imprisoned
in Endovier, but she has surprisingly survived the harsh prison for a year
where the life expectancy is only a month. Celaena has been hardened
frequently: she has lost her love as well as her parents in a brutal way. Her
lived experience has turned Celaena into a tough person. Furthermore, “she’d
been trained to be an assassin since the age of eight” (Maas, 2012, p. 8).
These conditions have provided her the opportunity to take the biggest
risk in her life; the Crown Prince Dorian offers her a deal that can lead
to her freedom: that is Celaena must win a competition that King holds. Throne
of Glass represents adolescence in the way that the teenager has
sufficient potential to possess self-determination and thus fundamentally
resists to what David Buckingham (2000) also contends against as the doomed
idea of ‘childhood as exclusion’, which defines children based on what they are
not to do and what they are not competent enough to do. Celaena writes a letter
on her will to the prince. She dares to thunder against the prince, “I’m going
to rip out your eyes and replace them with these billiard balls” (Maas, 2012,
p. 213). Through depicting the abilities and intentions of Celaena, the novel
suggests that she does not merely require adult protection, but rather the
opposite. Celaena is the one that can provide protection for adults- in
particular for the King.
The novel Throne
of Glass is labelled as children’s literature but complicated. This is
partly because the story is set in children’s literature, which consists of two
problematic terms: ‘children’ and ‘literature’. Nonetheless, its complexity is
laid in the stories as well. For instance, in spite of having strength, beauty,
and advantages Celaena is still, confused, vulnerable, and alone. By
the end of the competition when her position as the King’s Champion is certain
she has no idea what to do: “she didn’t know whether to smile, or to laugh, or
to nod, or to cry and dance about” (Maas, 2012, p. 402). When a dog approaches
her with a wagging tail and lays on her feet, the novel reflects about Celaena
that “[a]t least someone was glad for her company” (Maas, 2012, p. 28). Above
all, Celaena suffers from loneliness, “no one has called me friend in a long
time” (Maas, 2012, p. 242). Celeana does not seem happy and as an assassin, the
issue of feeling guilty is also ruled out because she has never committed a
murder. In fact, nothing is wrong with her except that she is exceptional. The
novel may involve different categorisation in Celaena’s personality such as
gender and social hierarchy but what leads her to solitude, confusion, and
dejection is her extraordinariness. Celaena has lost her feelings as an
ordinary female adolescent and distanced herself from conventional femininity.
Katherine Cruger goes so far as to argue that the “heroines often reject
conventional expressions of femininity (2017, p. 117). In the novel,
a rather multilayered personality emerges beneath the fantasy heroine. Although
she is a role model, she lacks the common feelings of a usual young girl and
that is the complex representation of adolescence.
Celaena is a
complex character not because of having the mentioned contradictory qualities
in the story, but also as a fictional female character, her personality is
subject to a cumulative effect of readers’ understanding and inspiration. The
concept of adolescence in the novel and its understanding is a mutual task
between the text and the reader. The text is written and is fixed, whereas its
reading may differ based on the level of conceptual understanding and the way
that a reader perceives and interacts with the novel in a time. For instance,
based on the early feminist text which led to the theory of feminism “women are
[…] degraded by mistaken notions of female excellence” (Wollstonecraft, 2010,
p. 87), that is the beauty. In this reading, Celaena’s beauty can be
considered as her Achilles heel, while in others it may not. This means that
reading of the young adult novel has a dynamic fluidity nature throughout the
time. As Peter Hunt admits in his book Understanding Children’s
Literature (2005) that because the theory of children’s literature
continually blends readers with the book, “we have to accept that children’s
books are complex, and the study of them infinitely varied” (p. 2). This is one
of the reasons that the literary label of young adult fiction has not yet been
completely defined. Likewise, the novel demonstrates adolescence as a complex
concept rather than providing a straightforward representation.
In both
stories, the main child characters are demonstrated to have only some features
of an individual character and are not represented to possess a complete
identity. In Throne of Glass, either the novel or some other
characters in the novel avoid admitting Celaena’s proper personality. Cain, who
is a hulking brute and is about to contest Celaena in the competition, says to
her, “[p]retending to be a lady doesn’t mean you are one” (Maas, 2012, p.
202). The novel itself frequently mentions Celaena as ‘the
assassin’, and additionally, Celaena is named differently: Prince Dorian tells
her that “[t]o everyone in this castle, […] your name is Lillian Gordaina”
(Maas, 2012, p. 71), Nehemia says to her that “I name you Elentiya” (Maas,
2012, p. 321), and even Celaena herself does not care what her name really is,
because she is an assassin anyway, “I’d still beat you, no matter what you call
me” (Maas, 2012, p. 352). Likewise, in The Children of the King, May
is represented with a vague identity. Instead of being called upon her real
name, May is often mentioned as ‘evacuee’ in the novel, “‘I don’t break
things,’ said the evacuee” (Hartnett, 2012, p. 28), or “the evacuee deserved at
least a reprimand” (Hartnett, 2012, p. 50). As David Rudd argues, the main
subject matter of adolescent fiction is that the “notions of identity are
formed within specific contexts and shaped by larger social structures and
processes” (2010, p. 140). In both novels, children are demonstrated to have a
fraction of identity and that implicitly refers to their identity as a
concomitant result of the formation process within the larger structures of
society including institutions, families, and peers. The idea that children are
lacking a complete identity implies the concept of childhood as an incomplete
stage in which, inevitably, the growing up toward a full identity is predicted.
However,
unlike showing that the child does not have a complete identity, the novels, in
the meantime, demonstrate that the child is able to have the same attributes as
mature people. There are some features demonstrated in the attitudes and
behaviours of May and Celaena suggesting that they possess some adult qualities
that are yet to be developed. In this way, the novels affirm that adolescence
and childhood are not merely steps of growing up oriented to adulthood but
rather complicated states of individual beings. Despite the fact that May is
just a ten-year-old girl, she possesses a high degree of daring and a strong
sense of dignity. In the very first encounter of the Lockwood
family, Cecily thinks that May will get excited upon hearing her offer to live
with them in Heron Hall; although May accepts, she is not impressed by Cecily’s
offer at all. The novel describes, “the glint in her eyes suggested she could
live off scraps and sleep soundly in hay” (Hartnett, 2012, p. 27). Furthermore,
May is depicted to have the feature that adults often have and not children;
she says to Jeremy that “I’m not scared of anything” (Hartnett, 2012, p. 30).
Likewise, the entire story of Throne of Glass narrates how a
teenage girl fights within the brutal system of the monarchy to achieve her
freedom. The novels show that adolescence and childhood are not entirely incomplete
stages, but children have some qualities and possibilities to affect others.
This idea that dismisses the notion of adults as the only complete stage of
personality can be validated by the scholarly argument that says, “If childhood
is thus defined as a process of becoming, adulthood is implicitly seen as a
finished state, in which development has effectively ceased.” (Buckingham,
2000, p. 14). In fact, the human being is yet to develop, and that
is a constant trend. Therefore, the idea of completeness should be blurred at
least in the novel tradition. That is to say, that adulthood or childhood
neither of them are complete.
The unique
condition of Celaena is a problematic matter to her. Celaena is a tough
heroine; furthermore, she is also depicted to possess extreme stunning beauty
and at the same time she has a high level of strength. Her beauty causes other
jealousy, while her strength drives the intense rivalry of the rest of the
competitors. The novel repeatedly expresses her elegance and beauty, “[s]he
looked spectacular. Utterly and completely spectacular” (Maas, 2012, p. 45).
Due to her superb beauty, Celaena has attracted the Crown Prince Dorian. It
awakens the sense of grudge and jealousy in Kaltain, a young lady from a
pseudo-aristocratic family. Kaltain is intended to get the attention of the
Prince. Her jealousy goes so far as to give the poisoned drink to
Celaena right before her competition against Cain, saying, “Drink, and let Her
bless you, and replenish your strength” (Maas, 2012, p. 353). The novel also
describes Celaena as the most nimble, extraordinarily fast-footed to
escape three hundred sixty-three feet from her shaft, while any other escapee
could hardly run three feet before they were shot down by the prison sentries
(Maas, 2012). The sum of these perfections in the presence of Celeana has
turned her into the centre of attention, and consequently, she has been
affected by others while Celaena herself affects others. Celaena effectively
influences the relationships around her. This rejects the idea that childhood
is mostly subjective to the will of the adult and thus the novel represents
adolescence in the way that validates David Rudd’s argument that children “also
have subject positions available to them that resist [being merely adult
discourse]” (2005, p. 17). Throne of Glass represents
the child to have a role in constructing adolescence, and therefore,
effectively shape his or her identity.
From
illustrating the concerns of the adult to protect the child in The
Children of the King to demonstrating child with the extraordinary
potential of power and elegance in Throne of Glass, the
construction of childhood and adolescence in these two novels varied from representing
the conventional concept of childhood to fantasising of a teenager girl as a
superheroine. While Throne of Glass explores the concept
of adolescence in relation to the anxiety of being extraordinary and under the
influence of power, The Children of the King represents
childhood within direct observation of war and displacement by children,
which then led them to understand history in close relevance to their
current life. Nevertheless, both novels affirm the concepts of childhood and
adolescence as utterly complex ideas and reflect upon these ideas in different
ways.
References
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