Working Against Closure: Sexuality and the Narrative Endings of Little Women and Jacob Have I Loved

The issue of sexuality is traditionally considered risqué in children’s literature. It has been avoided to such an extent that authors tend to shy away from featuring adolescent protagonists in their novels so that they do not have to handle the topic of sexuality, since adolescence is normally the time in a child’s life when a sexual awareness begins to emerge. Adolescence represents a difficult time period, both socially and literarily, because although sexual feelings begin to emerge in young adults, they cannot yet be confined in the socially acceptable bond of marriage. Critic Leslie Fiedler makes a clear link between the age of the main character and the expression of sexuality in literature. Barbara A. White paraphrases him by saying that in the early nineteenth century, “the emphasis on pre-pubescent heroines can be traced to the expurgation of the seduction theme from American literature, ” implying that protagonists could not be adolescents because that would entail addressing sexuality (23). More recently, Katherine Paterson, author of Jacob Have I Loved (1980), explains, “I’m aware of how reluctant I’ve been to have adolescents as central characters. To write convincingly about adolescence, sexuality has to be a huge part of what you’re describing, and I just don’t know if I want to spend that much time on it ” (Lehr 25). Clearly, featuring an adolescent protagonist entails grappling with the topic of sexuality, and this challenge becomes even more difficult when the protagonist is female, due to the social and cultural restrictions placed upon a woman’s expression of her sexuality. Traditionally, adult novels of the nineteenth century that featured a female protagonist centered on the idea of courtship and culminated in the ultimate socially acceptable expression of sexuality for a woman—marriage—and oftentimes children’s literature followed suit. The emergence of children’s literature followed on the heels of the immense popularity of domestic