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Too Much Feeling: S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders - Coggle Diagram
Too Much Feeling: S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders
Fear and Love
Emotions and Juvenile Fiction
Conficting Emotions
Watching the Sunset
Emotional Socialization
"Stay Gold"
The theme of emotion is quite recent among the literary scholars and it has a lot to do with the post war context
Johny´s deman to Pony t "stay gold" signifies remaining inocent and childlike, this claim , however, has indeed subversive aspects as it encourages the development of a new emotional style within the strict masculine and youth communities in the 1960´s
Hinton knows her audience and how to connect with it, appeling to their current needs, interest and global context
Novels writen for YA have been strategically used as tools for emotional socialization, enculturation, political persuation and ethical eductation.
The ways emotion is portrayed in literary works has dramatically changed in the past decades
The role of morals have shifted (forbiding and permiting certain feelings)
Children have been empowered to accept, embrace and validate their emotions, while at the same time they have been made responsible for their self development.
Growth of minority representation in L.N. leadidng to emotional growth
Fellings are neither biological nor chemical, instead they depend on the contexts they develop
Emotional communities: groups of people that value- or devalue- the same related emotions.
The existance of said communities contributes to the formation of shared identities and gives place to voice and action while at the same time might be a detonator of conflict
However, the emotions individuals are inclined to feel based on their context can indeed be shaped by external factors as repetition.
The outsiders conflict can be analyzed as:
1. A clash between conflicting models of youth:
the 19th century model of a child seen as a necessary contributor to the household and the 20th model of a child whose main focus was going to school and spending money on the same youth culture
2. Conflicting emotions and masculinity norms
: middle-class manhood is associated with numbness and the suppression emotion. Hinton argues that jvenile delinquencyy is a reaction to the crisis in masculinity
Emotion is used as a narrative
engine
3. Emotions secure social hierarchy in the novel:
The gresers feel way to much and the Socs feel too little, factor that, among other things provokes conflict among the two gangs
Fear and love dominate Hinton´s novel
1. Fear:
Fear is no longer represented in opposition to courage; instead, the feeling is fashioned as a necessary step towards courage.
Heroes, such as Ponyboy and Johnny start to acknowledge their emotional vulnerability, which later will transform into strength and courage, even at a subconscious level
This representation of fear is what separates the greasers from other juvenile delinquents of other contemporary representations
2. Love
The representation of love is also a factor that sets the Greasers appart of other gang representations at the time
20th century: There was a higher acceptance for the needs of others and importance of peer groups
The lack of present and loving parent figures for most of the gang members is what helped develop a strong bong amongst the boys and made the gang highly affectionate and protective over one another.
" The community thus creates space for actions of
love and vulnerability
, as well as enabling the formation of a more sensitive
masculine identity
"
The watching of the sunset by Johnny and Cherry carried different meanings for both of them (thing that is related to the emotional communities they belonged to)
For Pony: it is a representation of his sensitivity and sweetness
For cherry it was a representation of her past. The love of live she had los for being "too bussy"
Said events are connected to the "rat race" and "the malaise of modernity" as both concepts describe how the endless search for success distracts individuals from feeling and enjoying life
The "watching of the sunst" also reinforees the connection there is between emotion and time,specially noting how different spaces are evoke different emotions and different emotional expressions. For example, the church in where Pony and Soda hide after killing Bob functions as an emotional refugee for the boys , allowing them to release and relax all the emotional effort they were prevailing
Two symbolic events occur at the church:
The boys cut off their long greasy hair, a huge part of their identity as Greasers
Pony reads a poem that makes them notice their estrangement from society as, due to their sensitivity, they feel they are different from their family and their peers
As we saw through the constant use of emotives like "cool" and "scared" it is evident that both class mobility and aging can be connected to emotional struggles and a dangerous inhibition of feelings
"Stay gold can also be interpreted as a refusal of the "rat race"
Johny´s claim allign with the post war hippie cultures that relished on the state of wonder and simplicity as the seeked a so called "rejuvenation of society"
The relationship between youth and adulthood was based on adjustment: the younger generation must adjust tho the older one.
After WW2 this started to change as younger generations were inclined to "stay gold"
Said age gaps can be spotted between Pony and Darry as their differences and lack of ability to understand one another is constantly causing conflict between them
The emotionality of the greaser community, the exhortation to stay golden and watch sunsets and to "stay gold" are all part of a
literary strategy.
Through her narration Pony talks directly to the audience, this way stablishing a close relationship between the narrator and the reader
The Outsiders is a place for emotional socializations as it helps the reader navigate through a society of "Conflicting emotional styles"