In their 1965 song “Amusement Parks U.S.A.,” the Beach Boys, renowned celebrants of youth culture, articulate an essential theme park experience: “Buy your girl a cotton candy while you're down on the ground/Then take her on the twirl-a-way and spin her around.”Footnote 1 As these lyrics suggest, the amusement park, a quintessential American institution, positions boys as active subjects and girls as passive objects. This pattern is repeated regularly in fiction and film, where the theme park serves as a privileged site of coming of age. In this essay, I examine accounts of growing up in three recent novels that are set in theme parks and focus on girlhood: Lorrie Moore's New York Times best seller Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? (1995); Miriam Toews's A Complicated Kindness (2004), winner of the Governor General's Award for English Fiction; and Karen Russell's Pulitzer Prize-shortlisted Swamplandia! (2011). In these texts, theme parks offer insights into the wide disparity between the process of coming of age for girls and boys. As Stacy Warren observes, while theme parks are typically thought to offer escape, they are actually “inseparable from daily life.”Footnote 2 Moreover, as David Johnson argues, such spaces are “societies in miniature, reliable images of work, leisure, human relations and politics in the larger world outside.”Footnote 3 Reflecting the heteropatriarchal ideals of the wider world, the novels indicate that while theme parks offer boys adventure, they direct girls towards romance. Theme parks thus play a significant role in shaping adolescent expectations of future life, encouraging compliance with social roles and gender norms that are affirmative for boys but disempowering for girls. Although the texts highlight the constructedness of gender and female protagonists resist what Deborah O'Keefe calls “good girl messages” (instructions for socially approved female behaviour), their resistance proves limited or ineffective.Footnote 4 Thus, through the motif of the theme park, contemporary fiction by women shows that, despite the putative gains of second-wave feminism, coming of age in America continues to take place on unfair ground.
Mikhail Bakhtin's analysis of carnival points to the subversive possibilities of the theme park, an ostensibly disruptive space: “carnival celebrated temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order; it marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms and prohibitions … all were considered equal.”Footnote 5 However, in theme parks, which constitute the commodification of carnival, the potential for rebellion is compromised by capitalism. As Margaret J. King confirms, rather than a cathartic release from social restraint, “the powerful draw of true themed environments relies more on their ability to reflect core American values than on providing amusement in the conventional sense of the circus, carnival, and pleasure park.”Footnote 6 This suggests that, instead of the sense of temporary liberation from hegemony permitted by carnival, themed environments endorse the doctrine of the dominant order. Thus the “inevitability of change and transformation” that Michael Gardiner finds in carnival is not equally evident in theme parks.Footnote 7
As heteropatriarchal environments, theme parks make clear the importance that dominant American culture ascribes to normative conceptions of gender and sexuality. Established in 1895, Coney Island soon became “the model of the popular American amusement resort/park for a half century,”Footnote 8 and, as Kathy Piess notes, in such spaces “gender relations were ‘played out’ ” and “notions of sexuality, courtship, male power, female dependency, and autonomy were expressed and legitimated.”Footnote 9 Typically, boys and men are encouraged to test their strength and shooting skills, winning childish prizes such as teddy bears that can be gifted to girls. In this way, theme parks “inscribe ideologies such as gender codes.”Footnote 10 Further, rides like the Tunnel of Love affirm heterosexual romance: the slogan discussed by Russel B. Nye – ”Kiss Her in the Dark!” – addresses the same implied male visitor as the Beach Boys’ song.Footnote 11 Similarly, advertising for Coney Island's Cannon Coaster endorses heteronormativity: “Will she throw her arms around you and yell? Well, I guess, yes.”Footnote 12 The ideologies that underpin these amusements are reproduced in different guises in theme parks. According to King's analysis of Disneyland, theme parks are an “encapsulation of American myths and belief systems.”Footnote 13 As fiction and film demonstrate, nowhere is this clearer than in the fields of gender and sexuality.
The theme park's affirmation of social values and expectations, its function as “a form of discipline and social control,” is clear in its historical representation as a site of heroism or self-realization for boys and men.Footnote 14 J. D. Salinger's archetypal coming-of-age narrative The Catcher in the Rye (1951) presents a moment of epiphany that resolves the troubles of its protagonist Holden Caulfield when he watches his sister Phoebe ride a carousel in Central Park.Footnote 15 In Carousel (dir. Henry King, 1956), Billy Bigelow, a fairground barker, has a posthumous chance to redeem himself after failing his wife and child.Footnote 16 In E. L. Doctorow's The Book of Daniel (1971), the climactic closing scene takes place in Disneyland, when the eponymous hero completes his quest to confront the man who betrayed his parents.Footnote 17 Michael Crichton's Westworld (1973) presents a theme park in which “male” robots are programmed to fight human guests and “female” robots offer sex.Footnote 18 When the robots rebel, a sole male guest saves himself by destroying the android Gunslinger. With a lighter tone, the “giddy celebration of heterosexual romance” offered by Grease (dir. Randal Kleiser, 1978) “neither threatened nor challenged viewers through its glorification/satirization of traditional gender roles.”Footnote 19 Not only the ritual of high-school graduation but also the reconciliation of Sandy and Danny – in which Sandy transforms herself into the sexy sylph Danny has longed for – play out at a fairground. Gender conventions are foregrounded in Jurassic Park, too (novel, Michael Crichton, 1991; film, dir. Steven Spielberg, 1993): as Laura Briggs and Jodi I. Kelber-Kay argue, when cloned dinosaurs run wild, “females learn to be mothers, and men learn to be manly and responsible.”Footnote 20 Even “indie” films confirm that the fairground, which is often themed, is a prime site for heterosexual adventure. In Before Sunrise (dir. Richard Linklater, 1995), Jesse begins his brief romance with Celine with a kiss at the top of the Riesenrad Ferris Wheel in Vienna.Footnote 21
Another strand of texts presents the theme park as a site of redemption or triumph for male employees. In George Saunders's “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline” (1996), the narrator works in a Civil War theme park haunted by ghosts and terrorized by a teenage gang; the man employed to control the gang turns murderous, and the nameless narrator is one of his victims. However, his experience of death is akin to rebirth, in which “everything is bright and new and keen with love,” while his married life has been dull.Footnote 22 As in Saunders's later story, “Pastoralia” (2000), in Chuck Palahniuk's Choke (2001) female characters remain undeveloped, and are either impediments to the protagonists’ success or merely sexual objects.Footnote 23 In Mitch Albom's The Five People You Meet in Heaven (2003), although the elderly theme park employee Eddie dies whilst heroically rescuing a little girl from an accident at the “Ruby Pier” park, he is rewarded in Heaven.Footnote 24 Reiterating the motif of sexual success for men and boys in leisure spaces, in Adventureland (dir. Greg Mottola, 2009) the young male protagonist achieves self-possession during a summer spent working at an amusement park, whereas the female protagonist has a self-destructive affair with a married coworker.Footnote 25 By focussing on girls, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?, A Complicated Kindness and Swamplandia! highlight the damaging effects of conventional gender roles traditionally encouraged and confirmed by theme parks, endorsing Barbara A. White's contention that, in novels of female adolescence, “conflict over gender identity is the major theme.”Footnote 26
WHO WILL RUN THE FROG HOSPITAL?
Lorrie Moore's Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? depicts the coming of age of close friends Berie Carr (the narrator) and Sils Chaussée, two teenagers who spend one summer working in Storyland, a theme park reminiscent of Disneyland in its use of fairy-tale motifs. Although the novel is set in the early 1970s, the village in which the girls live is apparently untouched by the women's liberation movement, which might encourage them to query dominant social values. As Alison Kelly argues, Storyland is a “metaphor for America,”Footnote 27 and the park's theme of fairy tales and nursery rhymes emphasizes American norms of gender and sexuality, which the girls negotiate as they “fashion … [their] own selves.”Footnote 28 Confirming John Sherry's assertion that themed environments are “gendered in their abilities to fit gender perceptions and gendering in their ability to support existing networks of gender roles and relations,” Sils is given the archetypally feminine role of Cinderella because she is “beautiful” (10), already physically mature, and attracting male attention – “The boys adored her” (16) – whereas androgynous Berie is made a cashier.Footnote 29 Jack Zipes observes that “Cinderella” is one of the “more or less fixed classical tales … that have determined the manner in which we socialize children and ourselves and set up ‘civilized’ standards of behavior in the West.”Footnote 30 Illustrating this, wearing an evening gown and touring the park in a papier-mâché coach, Sils attracts hordes of adoring “little girls” (10) who – as if under a “spell” (15) – wholeheartedly embrace the myth of the heroine rescued from drudgery by a handsome prince. In this role, Sils demonstrates that female-oriented theme parks promise girls romance whilst, as the male-staffed Jungle Safari and Frontier Village nearby suggest, boys are offered adventure.
Sils, Berie and their friends do not submit to their roles entirely. Contravening the rule that “costumed employees … are not seen in areas where their particular dress would destroy the illusion of the theme idea,” workers at Storyland “wander into sections where they [are] out of context, out of character” (88).Footnote 31 Little Bo Peep visits Jungle Safari and Sils, in Cinderella costume, mooches cigarettes from Alice in Wonderland. Berie and her friends, known to be “sensible girls” (34), act out of character when they drink, smoke, swear, and stay out late with men they meet in bars, rejecting the role of “Good Girl” that Rachel Simmons defines as “an individual who aimed to please people …, toed the line … and didn't take risks.”Footnote 32 Their disruptive behaviour in Storyland marks them as “Bad Girls”, who are “outspoken … self-possessed …, and critical thinker[s]”: Berie regularly meets “Cinderella” to smoke, while Little Bo Peep, in bonnet and pantaloons, enquires if anyone has “seen [her] fucking sheep” (12).Footnote 33 Suggesting scepticism of romantic myths, Sils treats the princess-adoring little girls with disdain: “You'd think [they'd] get it” she complains to Berie, “Ceci n'est pas une pipe … There is no prince” (15). Her reference to the René Magritte painting The Treachery of Images (1928–29) draws attention to the novel's theme of the disparity between representation and reality, especially in terms of gender and sexuality. If there is “no prince”, literally in Storyland or metaphorically in the world beyond, then the promises of adult femininity and heterosexual romance are hollow. As Kelly notes, the implied happy ending of fairy tales “does not materialize for all.”Footnote 34 Indeed, the limited potential of the park is indicated by its theme song, which celebrates Storyland as “a place where a lot/of your dreams come true” (9).
The power of romantic myths and fairy tales is challenged further when fifteen-year-old Sils becomes pregnant. Cinderella does not marry her prince – boyfriend Mike – but turns to Berie for help. Berie assumes the role of “fairy godmother” (53) but, having no magical power, resorts to embezzling money from Storyland to pay for Sils's abortion. More than a godmother, though, Berie becomes Prince Charming to Sils's Cinderella, stealing a male role along with Storyland's cash. Emblematic of the white steed required by rescuing knights in shining armour, Berie finds a local taxi driver – a “dwarf” (59), another stock fairy-tale character – willing to take them to an abortion clinic and, as if sheltering Sils in a prince's cloak, allows her distraught friend to borrow her blouse to wear during the procedure. As Monica Fagan notes in her discussion of female friendship in the novel, Sils achieves “agency” over her body with Berie's help, while Berie “takes the risks and emotional responsibility,” confirming that Berie is dually gendered in this situation, a maternal figure and a masculine hero.Footnote 35 This duality indicates a recalibration of the girls’ relationship, from heterosexual friendship to something that could be identified as queer. Judith Halberstam contends that the “fantasies of otherness and difference” found in some contemporary animated children's films make possible “eccentric desires”: “In many of these ‘queer fairy tales’ romance gives way to friendship, individuation gives way to collectivity, and ‘successful’ heterosexual coupling is upended, displaced, and challenged by queer contact.”Footnote 36 Even though Berie's feelings for Sils remain unnamed, they border on romantic. As she later acknowledges, “All I'd ever wanted was to be with Sils” (140). Further, a female saviour and the rejection of reproductive heterosexuality implicit in an abortion constitute resistance to the gender roles maintained by Storyland and wider society.
However, demonstrating Lukas's point that working in a theme park can “often result in a closer association of the person with the theme than might be anticipated,” Sils's continuing loyalty to Mike after the abortion suggests that she does not have complete critical distance from the romantic ideals she ostensibly scorns.Footnote 37 Equally, Storyland's gender ideals encourage Berie to admire Sils as the epitome of heterofemininity, illustrating Phillip Wegner's point that space is “both a production, shaped through a diverse range of social processes and human interventions, and a force that, in turn, influences, directs and delimits possibilities of action and ways of being human in the world.”Footnote 38 Berie refers often and enviously to her friend's breasts and is anxious that she herself will never “develop” (13), an obsession that is fuelled by the evident power of conventional womanliness to attract male attention and approval. Moreover, when the theft of the money is discovered, Berie is punished for her rebellion by being banished – like a villain in a fairy tale – first to a Baptist summer camp and then to a boarding school. Both of these institutions mirror the theme park in their promulgation of those “good girl messages” that, according to O'Keefe, present “inanition as beautiful and virtuous.”Footnote 39 Berie develops “a great desire to be good, a nice girl” (120), and is discouraged from seeing Sils, who is “not a good influence” (122). Berie's internalization of heteropatriarchal norms is confirmed when she loses touch with her beloved girlhood companion, who is replaced with a series of boyfriends. Thus the novel's queer subtext is dissipated by surrender to the overwhelming power of heteropatriarchy. Nonetheless, Berie never forgets Sils, who continues to recur in her dreams years later.
The novel underlines the dangers and disappointments of romantic myths propagated by Storyland through the motif of frogs. Moore's title invokes the story “The Frog Prince,” in which a princess kisses a frog, who then transforms into a prince, whom she marries. If fairy-tale frogs represent the prospect of romance, the novel reveals contrasting attitudes to romantic myths: while boys shoot frogs, Berie and Sils rescue them, an endeavour immortalized in Sils's painting called “Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?”. Further, anticipating the death of Berie's romantic dreams in adulthood as her marriage collapses, the frogs expire. Although Berie marries, she does not live happily ever after. Without Sils, her life is characterized by “stunned and anxious missing” that is “not to be endured, not really” (130), and marriage to an abusive man offers no compensation for her loss. In contrast to the disempowering effect Storyland has on Berie, her husband Daniel uses a theme park metaphor to express the thrill of infidelity: “ ‘It's like I'm on a ride,’ he says, ‘I go up, up, and up, and then wheeeee’ ” (144). Berie extends the metaphor to warn him that if he takes the ride he risks losing his keys, leaving him unable to “get back into the house” (144). Her willingness to tolerate Daniel's betrayal and adoption of his metaphor demonstrates that, years after leaving Storyland, Berie remains psychologically trapped in the theme park.
A COMPLICATED KINDNESS
Miriam Toews's A Complicated Kindness also acknowledges the difficulty of resisting the gender norms produced and replicated in theme parks. In this coming-of-age story set in East Village, Manitoba in the early 1980s, the narrator, seventeen-year-old Nomi Nickel, volunteers in a living museum that represents her Mennonite community in an earlier era. Like Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia, the museum is educational but also nostalgic, illustrating Michael DeAngelis's proposition that “nostalgia, a return to an imagined and simpler American past of yesteryear,” is central to the allure of theme parks.Footnote 40 In this the museum echoes the aims of Disneyland's “Main Street USA,” a scaled-down version of a “quintessential small town of Middle America in the early 1900s,” which vows to deliver the “optimism of a simpler time.”Footnote 41 In the novel, American tourists are drawn to the Mennonite museum village to enjoy the sense that “life is so refreshingly uncomplicated” there.Footnote 42 Items for sale, such as “a bag of unbleached flour” (47) and “old-timey bread” (213), suggest that the “simple ways” (47) of the Mennonites can be purchased by visitors. The museum's success, like Disney's, indicates a cultural longing for the traditional model of community and family seemingly embodied by the Mennonites, feeding a collective fantasy of return to the past, implicitly one that is more conservative in terms of gender.
The Mennonites' commitment to conventional models of gender is reflected in Nomi's role as a dairymaid in the museum, “robotically pushing a broom handle up and down in a ceramic jug of cream while Americans took pictures of me for the folks back home” (59). Tradition and domesticated womanhood clearly appeal to visitors, who are “disappointed” if the residents of East Village fail to replicate the antimodern roles played out in the museum, as they “pay good money to see bonnets and aprons and horse-drawn wagons” (53). Echoing Jean Baudrillard's analysis of Disneyland as a simulacrum (1981), the novel undermines the distinction between what is authentic and inauthentic. According to Baudrillard, “Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of … the America that surrounds it [is] no longer real, but belong[s] to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation.”Footnote 43 Similarly, in A Complicated Kindness, while tourists believe both village and museum to be equally authentic, Nomi sees that they are equally unreal: the “real town” is “not really real” (47–48). Like the museum, the “town is like a movie set. Nothing real is allowed to happen” (91). In contrast to Baudrillard, who fails to take account of gender, Toews employs the theme park to stress the constructedness and artificiality of heteronormative gender roles.
Conventional gender roles enforced by the Mennonite religion and replicated in the museum hamper Nomi's ambition to live freely as a young woman in the contemporary world, about which she fantasizes: “If I had a magic wand I would walk down Main Street and go ting – you're now CBGBs … Ting – you're Lou Reed” (174). Longing to live in East Village, New York, instead of East Village, Manitoba, her invocation of Lou Reed indicates a desire to embrace a gender-bending counterculture. Like the subversive possibilities of the city, Nomi is entranced by two plain black dresses blown from a washing-line she sees “flying around like large crazy birds way up in the sky”, dancing “in this crazy, free, beautiful way” (40). Although suggestive of female liberation, neither dress escapes the village, one falling on a barn roof, the other landing at Nomi's feet as if the costume, and the feminine role it represents, is meant for her.
As the novel's title suggests, Nomi's relationship with the dominant ideology of East Village is complicated. Like the Mennonite concept of kindness, which blends concern and cruelty, Nomi's attitude towards her community's religious principles is contradictory. While she rejects the only career East Village offers, working at “Happy Family Farms, where local chickens go to meet their maker” (2), the excommunication of her mother for adultery and loss of her sister, who has eloped with her boyfriend, leaves Nomi craving the domestic security promised by the farm's name: “The only thing I needed to know was that we were all going to live forever, together, happily” (17). A “pious little Menno kid” (18), with beliefs like “crystal-clear waters” (44), Nomi's positive view of her community convinces her that, rather than feeling suffocated, her mother enjoyed feeling “like she was part of something” before being banished (89) and that her “public display of agony” in response to her punishment is a sign of regret rather than rage (93). However, this implicit defence of Mennonite life is qualified by Nomi's enactment of the role of dairymaid at the village museum, which communicates her increasing disillusionment with the fantasy of a happy family. Her performance of domesticated womanhood is subverted when she sets fire to her bonnet whilst smoking an illicit cigarette. In Lukas's terms, she fails to “consistently and convincingly deliver the theme,” a cardinal sin for leisure park employees.Footnote 44 As she is dunked in a barrel of rainwater by a tourist to extinguish the flames (59), the illusion of an idealized past is shattered for the visitors, and the fidelity of Mennonites to their core values is called into question.
Rather than a simple act of rebellion against an archetypal female role – not uncommon among the local “drinking, dropping, smoking, swearing, screwing” kids (34) – Nomi's failure to adhere to Mennonite values causes her deep discomfort. When an acquaintance notes that she luckily has “no scars” as a result of the accident, Nomi thinks, “YOU ARE SO UNBELIEVABLY WRONG!” (59), suggesting that her botched performance in the museum has caused her pain despite her wavering commitment to her community's ideologies. Further evidence of Nomi's inability to completely reject the tenets of her faith is offered by her response to her mother's disappearance. Despite evidence that her mother may be dead, Nomi remains optimistic about her fate, demonstrating that Toews does not dismiss positive aspects of religion: “Who cares about facts, right? We're talking about miracles” (55). This problematizes James Neufeld's contention that Toews reduces “the complexities of faith to the simplicity of its prohibitions.”Footnote 45
Despite her desire for family, Nomi's romance with Travis results in disenchantment. The picture that she draws of the fictional Grass family (107) whilst claiming to work on a portrait of him suggests that Nomi is more attracted to what Travis can potentially offer her as a husband than to him as an individual. His role in the living museum – a married man – enhances his appeal in that regard, but his actions there further erode her belief in the possibility of a stable and secure family life. He plays the part of a devout man married to a pioneer girl, but their representation of a traditional marriage is undermined by the addition of a “Cabbage Patch doll in a cradle” (183) to complete the family scene, their smoking a joint (185), and the wife's admonition that her husband “get his ass back in” (214) to the “authentic replica housebarn” (183) in which they enact their roles. Nomi's worries that Travis is having a real relationship with his “fake wife” (185) are confirmed late in the narrative when she discovers that he is indeed having sex with his coworker. When Nomi spells out her boyfriend's name in cigarettes, then smokes those that form the “T”, “Ravis” evokes “ravish” (226), signalling her reconception of him as predatory rather than reliable. As his name suggests, her boyfriend's version of fidelity and, by implication, the ideals of commitment to which Nomi subscribes are a “travis-ty.” Nomi's sardonic response to his betrayal suggests some critical distance from the fantasy promulgated by the theme park: “They must have found a sitter for the Cabbage Patch doll” (229), she notes. Despite this initial irony, Nomi is propelled into a crisis by the loss of her hope of family and stability. She acts out her bitter disillusion in absences from church, immodest dress, heavy drinking, drug use, and arson – actions that lead, as for her sister and mother before her, to excommunication.
Despite being “banished” (240), Nomi cannot bring herself to leave East Village. Although she earlier claims, “If I could live anywhere else in the world, anywhere, I would” (53), the narrative closes with her admission that she has not yet left: “This story ends with me sitting on the floor of my room” (246). She acknowledges that “endings are my weakness” (79) and that she does not know how to “say goodbye to people in the manner of a person going away for a long time” (64), suggesting that this is a role the village museum has not equipped her to play. As Margaret Steffler notes in her discussion of language in the novel, Nomi is “the bewildered victim of inexplicable desertion and betrayal rather than the rebellious adolescent deserter.”Footnote 46 Demonstrating her internalization of Mennonite values, Nomi cleaves to her dream of “a happy family reunion someday” (246), and her longed-for departure is ultimately inhibited by a fear of “who [she'll] become if [she] leaves this town” (246). So although Paul Tiessen argues that Nomi's name is an appeal to the reader for understanding – “ ‘Nomi’ (‘know me’) she is saying” – her stasis at the novel's end reflects her fear that there will be “no me” without the Mennonite community to define her.Footnote 47 She tells Travis, “when it rains … even cows and horses bunch together to protect one another from the elements” (82), showing the appeal of a sheltering community and, at the last, she still longs to return to the security of childhood, when her family appeared to mirror the one idealized in the living museum, even though both have been revealed as “beautiful lie[s]”. Thus, like Berie Carr in Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?, Nomi finds theme park myths impossible to resist despite the disappointment they bring.
SWAMPLANDIA!
Karen Russell's Swamplandia!, set in the eponymous “Number One Gator-Themed Park and Swamp Café” in the Florida Everglades, focusses on the Bigtree family.Footnote 48 Following the death of “world-famous alligator wrestler” Hilola Bigtree (3), the park's star attraction, male members of the family (the Chief, his father, and son Kiwi) leave in search of new opportunities. In contrast, Hilola's teenage daughters Ava and Ossie remain, choosing the apparent freedom offered by the park's marginality over the uninviting mainland, which they see as an oppressive “crush of cars and strangers” where people live “like cutlery in drawers” (54). Located “thirty-odd miles off the grid of mainland lights” (3), Swamplandia! appears to escape the imposition of gender norms. Hilola's unconventional role as a female alligator wrestler seemingly contests the established view that the swamp is an “emphatically masculine realm.”Footnote 49 Likewise, Ava defies notions of female passivity and weakness in her faith that she can save the park by training to take her late mother's role. Indeed, by calling alligators “Seths” Russell implicitly invokes the Egyptian figure Set or Seth, the god of evil, a man who sometimes takes the form of a crocodile, suggesting that alligator wrestling represents resistance to patriarchy.
However, rather than offering a positive vision of female empowerment, Swamplandia! serves as a warning against the postfeminist myth that, by the end of the twentieth century, gender equality had been achieved, rendering feminism redundant. In Living Dolls, Natasha Walter explains that where she once believed that “the remnants of old-fashioned sexism” would wither away as a result of feminism, she now sees “a stalled revolution,” and a “resurgence” of traditional gender ideologies.Footnote 50 According to Walter, while institutional structures remain largely unchanged, the success of “individual women” has resulted in a dangerous “complacency” in the face of “renewed sexism.”Footnote 51 Likewise, in Enlightened Sexism (2010), Susan J. Douglas argues that images of powerful women that emerged in the 1990s and 2000s helped to endorse the myth that contemporary American culture is post-patriarchy. Citing politicians such as Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin; high-profile female CEOs and news anchors; and fictional female attorneys, surgeons, police chiefs and judges in TV dramas, Douglas proposes that representations of women in the media suggest female empowerment but actually offer “little more than fantasies of power” that “assure girls and women, repeatedly, that women's liberation is a fait accompli and that we are stronger, more successful, more sexually in control, more fearless, and more held in awe than we actually are.”Footnote 52 Images of powerful women thus “mask, and even erase, how much still remains to be done for girls and women.”Footnote 53 Female action heroes or “action babes” aimed at girls – vampire slayers, warrior princesses, and tomb raiders such as Buffy, Xena and Lara Croft – are particularly ambiguous since, as Douglas notes, “power” is predicated upon their femininity and sexual attractiveness to men and is not actual power in social/political terms.Footnote 54
Swamplandia! highlights the danger of the illusion of female empowerment suggested by strong women when there is little real social change. Despite its feminist potential, Swamplandia! is not totally unlike the typical theme park. Annette Pritchard notes that “women are conventionally used to suggest the quintessence of the exotic” in theme parks, and Hilola is described on promotional material as a “Swamp Centaur” (5), a mythological, hybrid creature.Footnote 55 Further, the appeal of Swamplandia! relies on “the commodification of ethnicity,” an American tradition “probably as old as tourism itself.”Footnote 56 Masquerading as Indians, the family pose in “tribal apparel” to attract customers, even though, as Ava recognizes, they in fact have “not a drop of Seminole or Miccosukee blood” in them (5). Additional evidence that things in the park are not what they seem is found in the Bigtree Family Museum, which displays “all kinds of crap from our house … relabelled as BIGTREE ARTIFACTS” (23). Moreover, there is a suggestion that Hilola's power is illusory. Although, early on in the novel, Ava observes that her mother “always won” (7), she later discovers that Hilola's alligator-wrestling trophy is from a non-existent championship (121).
The fates of Ava and Ossie underline the dangers of complacency inspired by the illusion of empowerment. Although being part of the “Bigtree Wrestling Dynasty” encourages Ava to believe in her own strength and agency (29), she and her sister are, in fact, intensely naive and vulnerable. As Ava notes, after her mother's death, “we fell” (7). Without Hilola's protection, Ava and Ossie fall into trouble but also fall from innocence in terms of their interactions with men, suggesting that in contrast to Coney Island – the “Electric Eden” – Swamplandia! is comparable to the biblical Garden of Eden, the site of patriarchal law in which women are punished for transgressing prescribed gender roles. Drawing on both the tradition of southern Gothic and cinematic representations of the swamp as a “breeding ground for natural and supernatural horrors,”Footnote 57 Ossie elopes with and is then abandoned by a ghost, Louis Thanksgiving, and Ava is raped by the sinister “Birdman.” Despite having a strong female role model in the form of their alligator-wrestling mother, both girls read “trashy romance novels” (19) as well as “myths and fairy tales” (83). Their susceptibility to compromising myths of gender endorsed by such texts is illustrated by Ossie's spells, which betray her preoccupation with conventional feminine concerns, having titles “that seemed to have come straight from the headlines of a woman's magazine (sleep enchantments, 479; a spell for happiness in marriage, 124; magic herbs to enhance beauty, 77)” (126). Similarly, despite believing herself “as strong as ten men, ferocious” (177), Ava is passive in the face of assault: “At no point had I tried to fight” (262). Consequently, she blames herself for the rape. Previously full of confidence, the attack leaves Ava fragmented: “My parts weren't summing into myself” (262). The danger posed to girls by the theme park is prefigured by the death of Hilola from ovarian cancer, a disease that mirrors the progressive destruction of the swamp by the invasive melaleuca plant. Emphasizing the compromised potential for female empowerment, Ossie is saved by her brother Kiwi and Ava by the male park rangers.
Like other boys and men who prosper in theme parks, conformity to dominant gender ideals affords Kiwi success. The contrast between his fate and that of his sisters is underlined by the structure of the novel, which interweaves their stories. Having relocated to a rival theme park on the mainland, the World of Darkness, Kiwi initially finds himself emasculated: his intellectual aspirations earn him the nickname “Margaret Mead” (61), he is deemed to have “girlish hips” (220), and his janitor's uniform is women's size medium (67). Yet Kiwi quickly attains the masculine role of lifeguard and heroically saves a young woman from drowning in the park's pool, earning him sexual favours and a new job as reward. His triumph is confirmed when, despite being named after a flightless bird, Kiwi learns to fly a plane and, on his maiden flight, rescues Ossie from Swamplandia!.
Sceptical about dominant narratives of female empowerment that imply that feminism is finished, Swamplandia! nonetheless acknowledges the importance of strong female role models. As she runs from the Birdman, Ava is forced to swim into a flooded tunnel with a “gator … swimming invisibly inside it” (303). Caught by the leg and bleeding, her death seems inevitable. Yet, in contrast to the passivity she exhibits when attacked by the Birdman, at this point Ava, suddenly visited by the spirit of her mother, resists and escapes. “Something entered me then and began to swell,” she recounts, and she frees herself from the alligator's jaws with “a strength that felt far beyond the limits of my small body” (305). Having “met” her mother in the pool, “Not her ghost but some vaster portion of her, her self boundlessly recharged beneath the water” (310), Ava leaves the pool, with her “insides still [holding] the space of the shape [her] mom had filled” (306). The scene points to the importance of strong female role models in the context of an ongoing feminist struggle against patriarchy rather than as substitute for it.
Yet despite her victory against the alligator, Ava's retrospective narration confirms that she never fully recovers from her traumatic experiences in Swamplandia!. Although neither she nor Ossie dies there, escaping their mother's fate, they never fully recuperate either. Their girlhood in the theme park, a place that affirms American values, shapes their lives as women in damaging ways. The assault leaves Ava unable to sleep for six months after the family leaves the island and her fear of losing Ossie again will, she says, affect her “until we are old ladies” (314). As in Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? and A Complicated Kindness, the narrator's attempt to resist gender norms is not an unequivocal triumph and her limited success underscores the importance of continuing to contest dominant ideologies of gender that are often internalized unawares. As Ava states at the end of the novel, appropriating her father's words to suggest the continuing importance of feminist resistance, “I think the Chief was right about one thing: the show really must go on. Our Seths are still thrashing inside us in an endless loop” (316).
In sum, the appeal of the theme park to adolescents – the opportunity to escape from everyday life and the promise of carnivalesque dissent – affords it a key role in coming-of-age narratives. Although Kenneth Millard argues that the contemporary novel of adolescence is characterized by an emphasis on temporality, by foregrounding the theme park, Moore, Toews, and Russell illustrate that space is as important as time in such narratives.Footnote 58 Moreover, through their representation of themed environments, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?, A Complicated Kindness, and Swamplandia! highlight a gendered disparity in the experience of growing up. Unlike teenage boys, whose self-realization and agency are facilitated by theme parks, girls find themselves disappointed or disempowered. Although the female protagonists resist the gender norms promoted by theme parks, they generally succumb to “good girl messages” that demand compliance and subordination. Since the theme park endures as a metaphor for American society, the novels indicate the persistent importance of feminism in a context where the ground upon which boys and girls mature remains unfair.
