![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
vcmwI reread it recently, trying to get ready to think about the treatment of hetero vs. homo sexual romance in the story, and I did the re-read all wrong. So now I'm feeling my way around here after the cut. (I didn't have my question with me as I read, and the things I noticed weren't the right things to answer the actual question. le sigh.)
The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky is one of the rare "young adult" books that I read when more-or-less a young adult myself and liked on its terms. I was 19 when it came out and I must have read it that year or the next. Since I was born in 1980 and the narrator in the story is 15 in 1991, he's a close contemporary to me, and a lot of the cultural stuff (zines, Rocky Horror, some of the music, the driving around in pickup trucks listening to mixed cassette tapes) is the cultural stuff of my own adolescence. The story is told in epistolary format in the first person voice of Charlie, a young guy who will probably grow up to be a pretty good writer. For now he's a kinda confused, somewhat alienated 15 year old freshman in high school.
If you work in the young adult literature field, you also know that this is one of the most challenged books in contemporary young adult literature. I read a professional article in the Young Adult Library Services Association magazine just last week that put it down as a poorly written problem novel. When reviewers hate it, they tend to hate it because they see it as being artificially stuffed with "issues" - drug use, homosexuality, sexual abuse, abortion, etc. There's also a dissatisfaction on the part of those reviewers with the way these issues are handled. Or, more precisely, how they are not handled. Most of the traditional problem novel elements are just treated matter-of-factly as elements in the lives of these characters. People who do drugs aren't necessarily drug addicts, and they don't necessarily go into recovery. The drinking teens aren't necessarily drunks, the girl who gets an abortion may not be happy about it but it's not a psychological focus of her life in the novel, etc.
Of course, that matter of fact aspect is exactly what I liked about it at 20, what made me relate to it - that these kids, with their problems, were like the kids I knew in college - a little messed up, a little confused, but not basically broken. Life just went on, despite the problems.
A lot of the relationships in the story are very unhealthy and/or confused, and this holds true for pretty much all characters, regardless of age or orientation. When ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
lady_schrapnell read it, she wondered, drawing from some nicely made points in the text, whether the text treated Patrick differently because of his sexuality - noting that "it all came close to having an undercurrent implying that being gay is such a big Angst-wave that all kinds of self-harming behaviour will necessarily ensue and be unworthy of comment. I know there isn't any such message really, but it did niggle at me."
And then I went back through the story reading Patrick's relationship with Charlie all the way, instead of Patrick's relationship with Brad. So now I'm just going to fumble some thoughts and associations.
The best I can come up with is that I think the novel draws a bright line between physical/sexual abuse and emotional abuse. And another bright line between intended or direct harm and secondary harm. Many of Patrick's problematic actions and decisions fall on the far side of that bright line. At least early in the novel Brad's behavior to Patrick is more indirect than direct, more emotionally than physically abusive. And I struggle even with the "emotionally abusive" label for his earliest behavior. He didn't put Patrick down verbally or insult him or anything else during the early part of the relationship - the comments about faggot and so forth came after the break. What Brad did was fail to have any courage about the relationship or to be caring or supportive toward Patrick. I'm not sure that the absence of caring is fully equal to abuse, though since his behavior later is abusive I can see where it would fall on a spectrum. When the behavior does become physically abusive, Charlie steps in and all Patrick's friends make it clear that this can't be tolerated.
While it's true that Charlie gets berated for kissing Patrick and Patrick doesn't get berated for kissing Charlie, I think this is a wash - it's pretty directly parallel to the situation with Mary Elizabeth, and no one berates Mary Elizabeth for her making out with Charlie when he didn't want her at all. My reading of it is that Charlie gave Patrick verbal responses (if I were gay I'd want to date you, I don't mind if you kiss me) that could reasonably have led Patrick to believe kisses weren't unwelcome. It's stupid to rebound from an angsty closeted relationship to trying to make out with a close friend who's either straight or closeted, but it's not stupid in a way I see as tied to his sexuality - it's just something you would do if you were a teenager out drunk and telling sexy stories with a person of your gender-of-choice who didn't respond negatively to your signals. Of course, Charlie doesn't respond at all - he can't - but there's not yet a way for Patrick to know that at that point in the story.
I think Lady Schrapnell's right, in a lot of ways, about Brad and Nancy. This is probably the worst thing that Patrick does, and he really should be called on it. And the story doesn't. The story, as a whole, doesn't approve of cheating, but no one identifies Patrick's hooking up with Brad and Brad having a girlfriend as making Patrick participatory in cheating. I think I chose to believe, when reading the story the first time, that Nancy was a beard - that Nancy doesn't really love Brad and that they're not having sex. That it's just a status relationship. Of course, there's nothing in the text to support or even suggest this. It's my wish fulfillment, like Charlie wishing that Nancy would be lesbian so she wouldn't be sad Brad didn't like her.
I think that this problem is a problem in a lot of how we perceive and discuss gay relationships in literature - it's as if, should one person be involved with individuals of both genders, then each relationship is invisible in its effect on the other. There are notable exceptions (Oz/Willow/Tara in Buffy the Vampire Slayer), but quite often stories are written as if the guy-guy or girl-girl relationship is totally separate across a wall from the co-existing guy-girl relationship.
On the other hand, cheating is not treated very strongly in the book. The appropriate response seems to be to break up with the cheater, and that's the end. There are few if any other repercussions. We see this with Sam and Craig, with Charlie's brother and his college girlfriend. There don't seem to be many expectations on the part of friends about how to handle a friend who is cheating or being cheated on. Patrick and Charlie don't talk to Sam about Craig's cheating. Craig doesn't stop being friends with Peter (though he does confront him and tell on him) over his cheating. So it's not off-the-spectrum that Sam, Charlie, et al don't do anything about Nancy getting cheated on - the story as a whole suggests that loyalty to friend strongly trumps loyalty to dupe in the cheating spectrum.
Ok, that's all I've got there. My impression is that being gay in a small town in the U.S. in the early 90s was likely to have a bit more angst than being straight at the same time, and that Patrick's messed up-ness doesn't seem to be off spectrum from the behavior around him. I wouldn't be comfortable making a call on whether the text is treating Patrick differently or the text is accurately reflecting differences in social history for the time and the viewpoints Charlie would be shaped by or able to draw from.
I do think, looking at it this closely, that Patrick's character is more likely to date the book than any other aspect. That is, the experience of being 16 or 17 and gay has changed a lot in the last almost-two-decades. A lot. Much more than the experience of being 16 and confused generally. More than the changes in music or drug use or anything else. Because I can remember thinking when I read the book in 2000 that Patrick was handled better than most young gay characters I'd read, and now I can think of several (Corny in Tithe and Ironsides, the incredibly charming bisexual boyfriend in Cycler, and most of the characters in David Levithan books) that I like better.
