Healing and Loss in Nelson S I Ll Give You the Sun

¶ … New Identity through Healing in Nelson's I'll Give You the Sun: A Feminist Critique

I'll Give You the Sun is a Michael L. Printz Award-winning young adult novel by Jandy Nelson that examines the complexities of coming of age, dealing with grief and loss, burgeoning sexuality, and healing. It gives a dual-gender perspective -- that of fraternal twins Noah and Jude, and from a feminist critique it offers an example of how the oppressions of patriarchal society are overturned by the subversion of the male status quo and the valorization of the oppressed (in this case, the valorization of the homosexual Noah and the female Jude). Throughout the narrative, the growing pains, experience of loss, and the concomitant healing process is given breadth through application of the feminist critique, which provides the framework for how Jude overcomes her initial negative sexual experience at a young age to grow into a confident and capable young woman leading both herself and her family towards a healthier frame of mind. The same can be said of Noah, who subverts the traditional male norm by openly embracing a homosexual lifestyle in the face of social and familial pressures. By steering attention and power away from the patriarch, Nelson crafts a novel that explores themes of trauma, desolation, youthful exploration, and overcoming obstacles, and that acts as facilitator of healing in the reader's own life just as the plot moves the characters of the novel through their own healing processes. This paper will show why I'll Give You the Sun is deserving of the Michael L. Printz Award and how through the lens of feminist criticism, the novel elevates marginalized types (the homosexual and the female) to a more central and powerful position by means of a tragedy-healing paradigm, where loss creates both a challenge and an opportunity for self-identification, growth, and healing.

Michael "Mike" Printz was a high school librarian in Topeka, Kansas and a consultant with Econo-Clad Books. He held a position on the Best Books for Young Adults Committee as well as the Margaret A. Edward Award Committee and was a strong advocate of "finding the right book for the right student at the right time" ("Who Was Mike Printz"). For Mike, young adult literature held an important place in the lives of young readers: it was a powerful tool to get across powerful messages that could help shape, guide, steer and reinforce values that the young readers would carry with them for the rest of their lives. Mike's death in 1996 prompted the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA) to recognize his contribution to the promotion of young adult literature by granting an annual award in his honor to "the best titles in young adult literature in a given calendar year" ("The Michael L. Printz Award Policies and Procedures"). Sponsored by Booklist of the American Library Association, the aim of the award is to draw attention to the best titles in the YA genre, to support the genre by promoting its writers, to give special attention to the social value of YA literature, to grow its readership, and to represent YALSA as a credible authority on YA books.

YALSA's selection of Nelson's novel is thus rooted in a tradition of focusing on stand-out talent that highlights real-life issues faced by young adults in today's world. Joining such titles as 2007's winner American Born Chinese and 2002's Step from Heaven, I'll Give you the Sun tackles the enduring questions of loss, suffering, identity and healing from the perspective of two adolescents seeking to make their way in the world. In this sense it is a bildungsroman, but its unique narrative style (alternating between the two twins' perspectives at different ages) gives the novel a fresh and original feel and an insightful look into how a feminist structure supports the overall direction of the novel's most important theme -- healing through the sharing of experience. This theme is a significant one that teens can appreciate as they face many life changing issues at a particularly vulnerable time in their lives when they are just beginning to understand themselves and how they want to project themselves in public. As Suzanne Mills Crawford shows, high school students most relate to themes that deal with contemporary issues -- and from the feminist perspective there is no more contemporary and pressing issue for millennials than the questioning of the male status quo, human sexuality, and women's empowerment. For this reason, Nelson's a novel places itself front and center at the heart of the young generation's primary concerns. By dealing with these concerns through the characters of Noah and Jude in a serious yet realistic manner, Nelson shows why she is most deserving of the Printz Award for this book. So just what does this book show that would make it so important for young readers?

First and foremost, according to a feminist criticism perspective, the novel subverts the traditional hegemonic gender norms by reversing expectations and elevating two marginalized types in literature to central and commanding roles -- the homosexual and the female. Even the mother, who dies tragically in the novel, leaving a large hole in the lives of the main characters, goes against type (as in most popular culture arenas it is expected that the male would be the one to "cheat" but in this novel it is the mother who takes a lover, Kate Chopin fashion). The death of the parent, however, serves as a plot device that challenges the young protagonists to find the strength within themselves and within their circle of family and peers to overcome the pain of grief and loss that her death forces upon them. Already having to contend with issues like puberty, sexuality, attraction, fitting in, standing out, finding one's place in the world, and dealing with petty jealousies (Jude jealously submits only her own application to the art school when she is told by her father to submit her brother's as well), they now must contend with the process of healing (Masquelier 48). Fortunately, this process once begun encapsulates all the other difficulties that the young protagonists are facing: by dealing directly with their mother's untimely death they are compelled to deal with themselves and the world around them. Accepting that which they cannot change allows them to accept themselves, to take responsibility for their actions, to own up, to confess and to forgive. That the two young heroes of the novel must essentially climb this mountain of grief on their own terms allows for further refutation of the status quo male as patriarchal protector and guider: Jude does her growing in isolation and alongside her mentor (who happens to be her mother's "forbidden" lover) and Noah does it by embracing his homosexuality and not being ashamed of it.

Likewise through their immersion in the world of art, both Noah and Jude reach a plateau that is transcendental in a way, and one that also reorients the reader towards accepting a less status quo variation on life (Noah is not a sports jock and Jude is the fearless, independent female). Art (not sports or politics) helps the two to bridge the gap between their immediate environment and place in the world and where they want to be. As Jeannine Jeffries points out, it is Nelson's preoccupation with her own fascination for the art world and for the issues facing contemporary society that prompts her to make her protagonists artists who undermine the traditional hegemonic gender norms. By showing how they are not only not defeated by grief but how they are able to overcome grief, heal and grow into capable young adults, Nelson gives an example of how millennials need not fear being different from the traditional status quo of patriarchal society but can rather, from the perspective of the feminist ideal, reach their potential and value as human beings.

The issue of healing is nonetheless a complex one, as Nelson illustrates. Indeed, the very structure of the book hints at this complexity. Not told from a single narrative perspective -- but from two: a female and a male perspective -- the novel underscores how different coping with grief can be for everyone. For instance, Noah copes by seeking a new life amongst new friends. His dissatisfaction with Brian's inability to open up in public about his own sexuality causes him no end of grief in and of itself, but Noah transforms from the isolated, introverted version of himself at the beginning of the novel to the extroverted, socially-participating version of himself at the end of the novel (he engages in a number of extra-curricular activities, etc.). Indeed, at the beginning of the novel it is almost as though Noah is in need of a catapulting event that will launch him into his own journey, as he is at the beginning of the book skulking in caves and shouting to God, "What the fuck! " (Nelson 14) in exasperation at the difficulties he is facing in his own adolescence. Noah identifies himself by what both he and his sister do -- as though he has no identity without her. But this sense of self is limiting his capacity for growth: he is too dependent upon another person to fulfill his own legitimate goals. What he has to discover (foreshadowed in his defense of himself against bullies in the opening chapter) is his own ability to grow, be strong, confident and capable all on his own. This is the journey he must make -- and it is different from Jude's journey (she is already strong, bold and daring and must make a more introspective journey to find her true self and source of spiritual strength). This difference is one of the main focuses of the novel and reflects the real differences that individuals utilize when coping with grief (Rask, Kaunonen, Paunonen-Ilmonen 137).

Noah's process of healing after his mother's death begins with his need to re-identify himself as his own person. In the first chapter he describes himself as only the other half of his sister rather than a complete person, a complete Noah: "When I don't draw us like this, I draw us as half-people," says Noah (Nelson 5). The two define each other as one; separated and as individuals they are incomplete, not whole. This is Noah's 13-year-old perspective talking. Part of the reason for his self-identification in this manner is that he is confused about himself, about his sexuality, about his tendency towards isolation and introspection. He is starting his journey, in a sense, at the opposite end of where his twin sister is starting hers -- and trough the course of the novel they will work to come to the middle. From a post-structuralist point-of-view, this would show how the dichotomy of the twins' opposite perspectives is really made the more ambiguous and uncertain by their meeting in the middle on the boat at the end of the novel, uniting their journeys. But Nelson's primary themes are grounded in the feminist perspective though a post-structuralist critique could also be made of the novel.

Regarding Noah's transformation and healing process from the feminist perspective it is necessary to examine his situation early on: He has just hit puberty and is only now beginning to sense that his identity is not dependent upon his fraternal sister, though when the book begins, his safety and security depend on her. The bullies who threaten to throw Noah over the cliff, who threaten to reveal the secret of his sexuality by flipping through his sketchbook, they are only repulsed by the arrival of Jude (that is, by the "overnight" arrival of her "boobs" and hair, which interest Noah's bullies more than the glee of tearing up his sketchbook). Noah's identification of Jude's burgeoning sexuality directly links her power over his tormentors to her sexuality, which both objectifies her through the "male gaze" and yet at the same time indicates her use of sexuality as a decisive stressor in the her role as (potential) matriarch. Noah secretly thanks his sister for being beautiful in this one moment, sketched forever in his notebook which falls to the ground discarded by the bullies: "Thank you, I tell her in my mind. She's always rescuing me, which usually is embarrassing, but not now" (Nelson 9). This early scene reveals the underlying feminist assertion at the heart of I'll Give you the Sun -- the empowerment of the female and the reinterpretation of the male (Noah is not status quo -- he is the millennial youth, the openly homosexual young man, who revises the definition of manhood and masculinity to fit more comfortably within the feminist critique).

The healing salvo that brings the two siblings back together again is also related to the feminist ideal, in which traditional sexual norms are invalidated and new norms approved of and welcomed (Noah's father, the man made of "truck parts" does not judge harshly of his son, and Noah, with his "new normal" family, sales out like the Biblical Noah in their own houseboat). The boat is not populated with animals, however; it is populated with the new ideals of feminist theory. These are the seeds that will be planted in the new millennium, just as Biblical Noah renews and regenerates life in the postdiluvian world. Noah (with his boyfriend), Jude (with her sexual empowerment) and their father (adopting the position of old, cuckolded patriarch, now giving up his position as patriarch to the next generation with its new set of sexually hegemonic dictums in which equality is not only facilitated between the sexes but the male gaze is redirected away from the female, who is at the same time exalted to a matriarchal position that eclipses the old patriarchal order.

Indeed, the unexpected death of the matriarch destroys the already unraveling relationship between the twins, and it comes at a point when the mother is already embarking on her own journey with the intention of severing forever the connection between herself and her husband. This is the ultimate act of feminist assertion -- the woman's prerogative taking precedence over any traditional norms such as matrimonial ties, obligations or vows. She is Edna of The Awakening, cutting loose from the Old World values -- yet, like Edna, she is not allowed to survive the breach. Thus she serves as the feminist prototype of the novel (writing the book on how Michelangelo was gay and in this sense laying the foundation for her own son's sexual/artistic journey), standing for sexual liberation, acting as the high priestess of the house (she communes with the spirit of their dead grandmother), being a bread winner, and even issuing forth a new code of morality in her own example. She is like a martyr for feminism (though neither one of the twins really accepts her affair as something positive for her) -- nonetheless, in her path is Jude to follow (quite literally as she befriends her mother's lover and comes to understand and appreciate what the two had). Jude's own sexual trajectory, however, hits a wall when she has a negative sexual experience at age fourteen. She has matured "overnight" as Noah has stated and her sexual blossoming places her on a pedestal that she is still too young to fully understand. Being placed in a position where she has some power over young men alternately exposes her to trouble and exalts her. It is another sub-dichotomy within the novel that is rooted in the overall schema towards with the underlying feminist tone directs the work: healing comes by way of liberalization of the mind, by way of accepting each other without judgment, by way of pacifying the past and apologizing for mistakes. In this manner, the novel resolves its issues and shows how two young people can survive the shipwreck of their lives intact, find and sort out their own identities, and come together again as a family. Jude assumes the role of the "new matriarch," guiding the way forward with the visions that have been passed on to her from her mother. She too becomes the priestess in this manner, but she also serves as the source of wisdom, finding and empathizing with her mother's lover (for whom she intended to leave her husband).

On the one hand, the fraternal twins identify with one another as children but their differences become more apparent when puberty hits and they begin to take different interests. Their different paths, in a sense, are what help them to grow and develop so that they do not smother each other by cutting off the air that each needs to breathe on his or her own. Yet, at the same time, this dichotomy fails to really provide the meaning of the novel, which is that in life, growth often comes by way of healing and acceptance. And for acceptance to take place, the twins need each other and need to forgive and embrace one another, confirming their own identities in the process. As Lauren Oliver notes, the twins "come up against the failure of dichotomies, of moral absolutes. Good and bad, freak and normal -- oppositional labels can't describe or define their experiences, and the book makes us see the pluralities that are everywhere." The ultimate failure of the dichotomy is that the twins are not opposed to each other after all, as the beginning of the novel suggests -- and the turbid relationship between the two over the course of the following chapters and years of their lives is only like the turbulence of flight in mid-air: the destination has not changed -- and the title of the novel reminds the reader of this. This is a book about selflessness and sharing -- about giving the world to each other rather than attempting to have it all for oneself -- about how true relationships are established and supported.

The book itself thus serves as an example of the healing ethos at the heart of the novel: it is Nelson's gift to readers, showing that she acts upon her own advice (as depicted through the characters' arc) -- it is better to give than to receive. By giving her mind through the text to her audience and sharing with readers her own experience of contemporary issues, refashioned and filtered through the lives of Noah and Jude, Nelson bequeaths not only the "sun" to her readers but also an entirely new worldview that is positively feminist in its deconstruction of patriarchal policy. Identity and self-knowledge, respect and empathy are important, but at the same time what bonds people together and allows for all of this to work is the effort that individuals make to go out of their own way to make another person happy. Thus, by giving another "the sun" -- that which gives light and life to the whole world -- one shows that consideration and sacrifice (one could easily "keep" the sun for oneself) are the foundations of growth and the ties that bind families together.

However, it takes Noah and Jude a while to actually realize this. After the death of their mother, they initially isolate themselves from their past lives: Noah makes new friends and confides in them while Jude confides in her art and in her imaginary friends (her dead grandmother for instance). This is consistent with the real-world practice of isolation that many grieving persons experience and so Nelson's novel gives a very realistic depiction of what it is like to suffer loss and to attempt to heal. Noah and Jude come to realize, thought, that they cannot fully heal until they confront their pasts and take responsibility for the cruelties that they have done to each other -- even to their father, whom they separate themselves from (the patriarch is not viewed as being a substantial figure in their lives -- it is they who must guide him in Nelson's view). As Marwit and Carusa note in their article for Death Studies, grieving apart and in one's own way is a natural phenomenon but it is not always the most helpful in overcoming the challenge that grief poses. Noah and Jude must come to terms with this reality and in doing so they allow the reader to experience the catharsis of healing that is beneficial to them too. Even though the reader has not physically been affected by the loss of a loved one, he or she is indirectly impacted through the experience of the novel and thus participates in the grieving and in the healing, which is like an inoculation against future loss or obstacles, making the reader stronger for having lived through the shared experience that Nelson has provided.

Likewise, the novel explores a dichotomy in spirituality vs. loss of faith. Jude embraces the spirituality of her mother, who believed that she could speak to the deceased but Noah loses faith in everything connected to the spiritual world. In one sense, Noah is too submersed in the material world of art and sexuality to really transcend the here and now, whereas Jude cuts herself off from the physical world after her negative sexual experience and opens herself up to the other dimension -- the spiritual dimension of life. Muselman and Wiggins assert that grief does awaken this dichotomy in real life and show how some do indeed become more spiritual after experiencing a profound loss while others reject the spiritual and turn to a more materialistic mode of existence that is based on relationship-building, work, pleasure, and transience. The spiritually-focused individual recognizes this transience as well but asserts that a permanence also exists in the world, at a higher plane than that of the day-to-day ordinary, and it is only reached through a kind of life of prayer, isolation and meditation, as Jude shows (Muselman, Wiggins 229).