Article: Pathways' End: The Space of Trauma in Patrick Ness's Chaos Walking

Kertzer, Adrienne, Pathways' End: The Space of Trauma in Patrick Ness's Chaos Walking. Bookbird, Jan 2012. Vol. 50 , Iss. 1;  pp. 10-19

Patrick Ness's Chaos Walking is a trilogy of ideas obsessed with the experience and healing of trauma. Using the conventions of speculative fiction to probe the relationship between the language of choice and the experience of trauma, Ness frames his representation of Holocaust-like trauma through his depiction of the collective memory and governance of the Land (the planet's indigenous inhabitants). As a result, Chaos Walking differs from many realist historical novels for young people that focus their narrative energy upon trauma as an individual psychological disorder. The trilogy's growing interest in its final two volumes upon the place of traumatic memory in the mind of the sole indigenous survivor of what is repeatedly referred to as genocide enables Ness to ask contentious questions about the healing of trauma, and how individual trauma differs from cultural trauma. 

[Headnote]
Patrick Ness's Chaos Walking is a trilogy of ideas obsessed with the experience and healing of trauma. Using the conventions of speculative fiction to probe the relationship between the language of choice and the experience of trauma, Ness frames his representation of Holocaust-like trauma through his depiction of the collective memory and governance of the Land (the planet's indigenous inhabitants). As a result, Chaos Walking differs from many realist historical novels for young people that focus their narrative energy upon trauma as an individual psychological disorder. The trilogy's growing interest in its final two volumes upon the place of traumatic memory in the mind of the sole indigenous survivor of what is repeatedly referred to as genocide enables Ness to ask contentious questions about the healing of trauma, and how individual trauma differs from cultural trauma.

"If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence." (George Eliot Middlemarch 191)

Recognizing that "[e]veryone agrees [Patrick Ness's Chaos Walking is] a great read," Matt Hilliard asks, "but what exactly is it about?" (Hilliard 2011). This essay proposes that Chaos Walking is a trilogy of ideas obsessed with the experience and healing of trauma. The quotation from George Eliot's Middlemarch that serves as the epigraph to The Knife of Never Letting Go (2008), the first volume of Ness's trilogy, provides a fitting introduction to the circumstances of the male settlers of the planet they have named New World. "[We] should die of that roar" is an apt description of how the settlers are initially tormented by the Noise-the telepathic transmission of men's thoughts and memories-that deprives them of the ability to keep anything private. In keeping with Roger Luckhurst's (2008) description of trauma as "violently open[ing] passageways between systems that were once discrete, making unforeseen connections that distress or confound" and Sigmund Freud's (1920) speculation in "Beyond the Pleasure Principle" that the trauma occurs when "an extensive breach [is] made in the protective shield against stimuli" (Luckhurst 3; Freud 303), the male settlers appear to be suffering a collective trauma produced by a lack of boundaries between the self and the group as a whole.

Todd Hewitt, the adolescent narrator of the first book, born ten years after the colonists first landed, regards Noise as the "mess" of men's minds: "It's what's true and what's believed and what's imagined and what's fantasized and... even tho the truth is definitely in there, how can you tell what's true and what's not when yer getting everything?" (Knife 42). Todd's definition points to the trilogy's title: "The Noise is a man unfiltered, and without a filter, a man is just chaos walking" (Knife 42). Todd's language not only alludes to the absence of a Freudian protective shield-a filter-but also to the absence of women in his town; he has been told that all the settler women died when the indigenous inhabitants of the planet "released the Noise germ during the war" (Knife 14). While references to indigenous inhabitants and germ warfare obviously remove the fantasy world of Chaos Walking from the realist setting of Eliot's novel, the novel's epigraph announces Ness's desire to situate Chaos Walking beside Middlemarch, the novel that Virginia Woolf (1925) called "for all its imperfections... one of the few English novels written for grown-up people" (Woolf 172). Including Middlemarch in his list of "unsuitable" books that adolescents should read (2011), Ness has no interest in rigid distinctions between young adult reading and adult reading. Young adults can and should read what adults are reading, and what Ness provides in Chaos Walking is a dystopian fantasy version of Middlemarch for the 21st century: a novel of ideas that addresses numerous topics of contemporary concern to readers of any age, including genocide, indigenous histories of conquest, terrorism, torture, ecological disaster, and media-induced information overload.1

All of these topics relate to trauma. Using the conventions of speculative fiction, Ness probes the relationship between the language of choice and the experience of trauma. Because he frames his representation of Holocaust-like trauma through his depiction of the collective memory and governance of the Land (the planet's indigenous inhabitants), Chaos Walking differs from many realist historical novels for young people that, despite their reference to events that might traumatize a collective group, focus their narrative energy upon trauma as an individual psychological disorder. In so doing, such books reflect the tendency John Stephens (1992) generalizes is characteristic of children's fiction as a whole. In contrast, the trilogy's growing interest in its final two volumes-The Ask and the Answer (2009) and Monsters of Men (2010)-in the place of traumatic memory in the mind of 1017, the sole indigenous survivor of what is repeatedly referred to as genocide, enables Ness to ask contentious questions about the healing of trauma, and how individual trauma differs from cultural trauma.

According to Jeffrey C. Alexander (2004) and Neil J. Smelser (2004) both individual and cultural traumas are related to concepts of identity. "I am Todd Hewitt," Todd reassures himself when Noise overwhelms him (Knife 17). The concept of identity is more complicated for 1017 who takes on different names that situate him in relation to his personal trauma: called the Return when he escapes the settlers and has returned to the Land, he becomes the Sky when he is chosen by the Land to succeed the former leader, also called the Sky.2 But at the novel's end, this multiply-named character has not resolved the relationship between his traumatized identity as 1017 and his trauma-free identity as the Sky. As a sign of this conflict and his remorse over the apparent death of Todd, he refuses to take the cure for the festering wound- the physical trauma-produced by the band that numerically marked him as a Holocaust-like victim. Ness leaves open whether 1017/the Sky's murderous attack upon Todd, the settler that he most hates, is produced by his ongoing trauma, or whether that trauma prompts him to mistake Todd for the villainous David Prentiss. After he has attacked Todd, Viola reads the doubt in his Noise as proof that he acted deliberately, but the ambiguity surrounding his agency in this attack foregrounds the fraught relationship between individual choice, the compulsive symptoms of trauma, and its resolution.

References to choice appear throughout Chaos Walking. In book one, Todd explains to a settler that he and the newly arrived settler, Viola Eade, had "no choice" but to blow up a bridge so that they could avoid capture by Prentiss, only to be told, "there's always choices" (Knife 157). In book two, The Ask and the Answer, numerous characters echo Mistress Coyle who tells Viola "We are the choices we make" (98). Coyle is leader of the mainly female opposition to Prentiss, and a survivor of an earlier female opposition to his tyranny, yet Ness emphasizes the resemblance between her and Prentiss when Prentiss uses the same words about choice in speaking to Todd (The Ask 18). Viola frequently chastises herself for starting the planetary war between the Land and the settlers (Monsters 523) just as Todd constantly berates himself for choosing to kill an indigenous inhabitant whom he is shocked to encounter, given that he has been led to believe that all of the indigenous inhabitants were killed years before. When Prentiss subsequently tells Todd he may have no choice in leading armies in a new war against the indigenous inhabitants, Viola also insists, "There's always a choice" (The Ask 459) to which Prentiss replies, "Oh, people like to say that...It makes them feel better" (The Ask 459). Given that writing for young people often encourages them to believe that there is always a choice, Prentiss's words function as more than the cynical comments of a character who often acts as though there are no limits to what he can choose to do.

The problem with this language of choice is its relationship to trauma. Chaos Walking is not just about the choices characters make; it is also about the debilitating experience of trauma. What the novel never clarifies is how a traumatized person can make choices. The contradiction between choice and trauma can be traced throughout the latter term's history. Originally derived from the Greek word meaning wound, a physical trauma nullifies choice. When bodies react to the trauma of a wound, they respond automatically. In the late nineteenth century, trauma shifted from its dominant meaning as a physical wound to a new meaning as psychological disorder. What puzzled Freud as he considered the nightmares that characterized psychological trauma was the absence of choice. In psychological trauma, the victim does not choose symptoms such as suffering repetitive nightmares that do not distinguish between past and present, a symptom that currently dominates fictional accounts of trauma as it does in Chaos Walking. The conviction that traumatized soldiers during World War One were choosing to imitate such symptoms led to accusations of malingering; the accusation assumed that a nontraumatized person could choose whereas a traumatized person could not.

The more we use the term trauma, the harder it is to be precise. As psychologist Richard J. McNally (2005) notes, the widespread use of the word "trauma" does not indicate clarity about what exactly it is: "trauma might be defined by the objective attributes of the stressor, by the subjective responses of the victim, or by both" (79). Cathy Caruth (1996) in her rereading of Freud's theories of trauma similarly blurs the distinction between trauma as event and trauma as subjective response: "trauma describes an overwhelming experience of sudden or catastrophic events in which the response to the event occurs in the often delayed, uncontrolled repetitive appearance of hallucinations and other intrusive phenomena" (11). Consistent with a fundamental uncertainty about whether trauma is the catastrophic event or the uncontrolled response to the event, Chaos Walking shifts from one definition to the other, and for this reason proves far better at explaining how characters recover from physical trauma than from psychological trauma.3

It is also striking that in a novel where so many characters are traumatized, either physically or psychologically, the word "trauma" appears only once. Presumably because the word has become so commonplace, the term is never defined. This assumption of knowledge is in sharp contrast to the introduction of trauma in American children's literature in the 1990s, when authors were conscious that they were introducing a new vocabulary to their readers.4 Rather than provide a definition, Ness takes advantage of readers' expectation that characters who have witnessed death, whether it is parental death or genocide, and either as victims or perpetrators, are likely to be psychologically traumatized. Assuming that we can recognize trauma, he subverts our confidence that we really do know what it is. The only time that the word "trauma" is used occurs when Viola realizes that her inability to hear Todd's thoughts may not be evidence of war-induced trauma, as she had assumed (Monsters 255). She suddenly realizes that the absence of Todd's Noise is the result of Prentiss's ability to control the male settlers through a combination of hypnosis and telepathy, an ambiguous power that not only constructs parallels between him and medical professionals accused of using hypnosis to implant false memories in their patients, but also paradoxically associates him with healing, since his power helps Todd deal with his own traumatic memories: "it makes the screaming of the war disappear...makes it so I don't gotta see all the dying over and over" (Monsters 108). What Viola had mistakenly assumed was a symptom of trauma is a way of reducing its symptoms.

Further complicating Ness's exploration of traumatic memory is the place of trauma in the representation of the Land. Literary scholars routinely assert that "one of the main features of trauma is the difficulty of verbal communication" (Higonnet [2008] 117), refer to the inability of "integrat[ing] the traumatic event into consciousness" (McMaster [2008] 57), and trust that "repetitive, intrusive forms of visualization" (Vickroy qtd. in McMaster 57) are key symptoms of trauma. In Chaos Walking we may well assume the effects of trauma as soon as we learn that an enslaved group of the indigenous inhabitants have lost their ability to communicate telepathically because of the actions initiated by Prentiss, and this is further supported when we learn that the indigenous language that Prentiss destroyed was visual, not oral.5 But the trauma of the enslaved group is quite different from the trauma-free visual communication system of the Land who have not been enslaved. The visual in Chaos Walking is thus presented as both symptom of trauma and also as "true language" (Monsters 81). Just as Viola has to learn to distinguish between symptoms of trauma and Prentiss's telepathic control of Todd's mind, so too are readers encouraged to question their assumptions about the relationship between the visual and the traumatic.

Readers are also encouraged to read Chaos Walking as a Holocaust novel. Although the Library of Congress cataloguing data does not classify it as such a novel, Holocaust parallels are plentiful: they include but are not limited to the enslavement of a targeted group, their numeric branding, the sadistic medical experiments inflicted upon them, the mass shooting that only 1017 survives, and the humiliation that he subsequently experiences as he broods upon the group's lack of resistance to their oppressors. When the Sky refers to "Crimes Against the Land" (Monsters 359), the phrase clearly echoes crimes against humanity, a phrase popularized during the Nuremberg trials of the Nazis, just as Neville Chamberlin's infamous defence of the 1938 Munich Agreement is an intertext of the mayor's speech: "PEACE IN OUR TIME" (Monsters 334).

Certainly the tension between the discourse of choice and the experience of trauma in Chaos Walking is similar to patterns evident in Holocaust fiction for young people. One recurring challenge of such fiction is the conflict between the genre imperative of giving young readers reassuring stories about choice and the historical reality that for the victims of the Holocaust, the space for choice was severely limited (Kertzer 2002). However, Ness deviates from the patterns that dominate Holocaust historical fiction for young people in a narrative that keeps demonstrating how easy it is for victims to become perpetrators. All three adolescent protagonists-Todd, Viola, and 1017-are both traumatized and in danger of becoming perpetrators. In contrast, eliding the distinction between victim and perpetrator is rarely an issue in 1990s children's fiction about the Holocaust; for example in 1990s time-travel fiction, young people tempted by neo-Nazi activity normally learn to abandon their admiration for perpetrators when they are transported into the bodies of Jewish characters during the Holocaust.6 But twenty years later, perhaps because we live in a post 9/11 world that the novel alludes to in the way Prentiss oversees episodes of torture by waterboarding, the distinction between victim and perpetrator blurs. The men who torture may have been traumatized by their exposure to Noise and thus more vulnerable to Prentiss's control, but when they torture, they are perpetrators.

Furthermore, because the Land possess a collective mind, the "Never forget" imperative of Holocaust fiction for young readers resonates differently. Ness's treatment of the Land's concept of leadership implies that memories of personal trauma threaten ideal leadership precisely because leaders who are traumatized are more likely to repeat the past. Although trauma victims are often portrayed as incapable of action-too traumatized to act- Ness's use of speculative fiction allows him to highlight the consequences when trauma victims have political power. In the final volume of the trilogy, the elder Sky (the current leader of the Land) constantly exhorts 1017 that in order to become a proper leader, he must master the rage and desire for personal revenge that torment him. He attempts to reassure 1017 that memory of the enslavement and massacre will persist, since in the collective memory of the Land, "nothing is forgotten," but 1017 responds that the memory of an event differs from the experience of it: "A memory is not the thing remembered" (Monsters 119).7 The Sky acknowledges that this distinction may be valid and it is one often drawn in Holocaust memoirs when survivors insist that those who did not experience the death camps can have no real idea of what they were like.

In addition, the need to enclose trauma in a separate space is evident when the Sky asserts that leadership requires secrecy: "the Land must sometimes keep secrets from itself...It is the only way to make Hope possible" (Monsters 272). Immediately following this statement-which as a metacritical comment about how hope is produced in young people's writing might be compared to Prentiss's observation about why people want to believe in choice-the Sky reveals that in the circle of the Pathways' End, a space guarded by Pathways (members of the Land dedicated to protecting such secrets), the Sky has hidden and healed Todd's stepfather, Ben. Defining Pathways' End as the space "where the Sky leaves thoughts that are too dangerous to be widely known," the Sky reveals that Ben has recovered from the physical trauma that should have killed him (Monsters 273).

Not just Ben but Todd too is placed within Pathways' End in order to recover from his severe wounds. Does the healing within the space of Pathways' End imply that 1017 might also place the rage produced by his personal trauma within this recuperative space? Ness never clarifies whether Pathways' End is also a place for healing psychological wounds. What he focuses on instead is the contrast between the elder Sky's view of the need for setting apart dangerous thoughts and Ben's post-recovery conviction that the future of the planet lies in evolving in the direction of the Land. Certain that if all the settlers can learn to speak as the Land do then there will no longer be any conflict, Ben embraces the concept of open communication-essentially a world without trauma; the Sky seeks to isolate it. In the conclusion of Chaos Walking Viola watches Ben and wonders if "every man [and perhaps every woman if the female settlers can learn to access Noise] will eventually give himself over so totally to the voice of the planet" (Monsters 590). While Ness provides no answer, we might consider how different Ben's faith in transparent, honest communication is from the Sky's advice to 1017. Characteristic of a novel of ideas, Ness does not indicate whose views are correct. Instead, he stresses that the true leader can govern wisely only if he is not driven by traumatic memories that he is unable to control. The Sky teaches 1017 that some personal memories endanger the good of the whole, and that the true leader has as little choice as the victim of trauma: "being called 'the Sky' is the same exile as being called 'the Return,' and more, not an exile he chose" (Monsters 268). The Sky has no choice when other members of the Land choose him as leader.

Although Chaos Walking might be read as gesturing towards contemporary practices of truth and reconciliation, a major difference between the conditions governing those practices and the conclusion of the novel is that 1017 is the sole survivor of the genocide. Only because there are no others is the relationship between his personal trauma and the collective memory of the Land so crucial. The ending of Chaos Walking is hopeful to the degree that it implies that the settlers and the Land have avoided cultural trauma because 1017 has chosen to "act like the Sky" (Monsters 539). This conclusion supports Jeffrey C. Alexander's thesis that cultural trauma is not the inevitable and natural result of a horrendous event (8). Insisting that "Events are not inherently traumatic," Alexander emphasizes that the construction of an event as a cultural trauma requires that "members of a collectivity feel they have been subjected to a horrendous event that leaves indelible marks upon their group consciousness, marking their memories forever and changing their future identity in fundamental and irrevocable ways" (8, 1). Alexander and also Neil J. Smelser stress that cultural trauma requires group agreement that their collective identity has been altered in a fundamental and negative manner, but this is not the case in Monsters of Men. Despite the settlers' discovery that some of them are natural "Pathways" able to transmit neural messages just as the Land Pathways do, there is little evidence in the novel's conclusion that the Land's identity has been permanently altered, and if it has been altered, the change is hopeful, not negative.

The story of 1017's uncertain transformation from traumatized survivor/witness of genocide to the Land's new leader exemplifies how Alexander and Smelser distinguish between individual and cultural trauma. As 1017, he is a traumatized witness, unable to escape repetitive visual flashbacks of the massacre of his fellow beings and of his "one in particular" (Monsters 271). To be an effective leader of the collective, to be the new Sky after the old Sky dies during the apocalyptic war with the colonists, he must (somehow) set aside his personal trauma in the way he abandons his earlier names. Just as Alexander connects cultural trauma to concepts of collective identity, when 1017 is told to act like the Sky, he is implicitly being advised that his personal memories threaten the Land's "sense of its own identity" (Alexander 10). The Land has experienced Holocaust-like events, but moving forward requires that the Sky shield his memories of personal trauma-he is after all the sole survivor-and control how they affect the memories of the collective.

In focusing the trilogy's final volume upon 1017, Ness raises several issues about Holocaust representation in young people's writing: not just the role of genre in affecting that representation but also the implications of Maurice Halbwachs's (1992) sociological thesis that social frameworks control what individuals remember. Consistent with the growth of genocide studies (in which the Holocaust is examined as one of many genocides), Chaos Walking depicts the Holocaust as a dominant but not unique genocidal event, and invokes Holocaust analogies that suggest that the Holocaust, like the word trauma, has entered popular discourse. Like Ness, Thomas Buergenthal (2009) in his memoir, A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy, is as interested in what comes after the Holocaust as he is in depicting its horrific details. Although he believes that his years in post-war Germany enabled him to "overcome hatred and desire for revenge" (192), in a Reading Group Guide included with his memoir, he admits that had he written his memoir earlier "the book would have dwelt too much on all the cruelties I witnessed and been hate filled" (2). And elsewhere in his memoir, Buergenthal is much vaguer about how long it took him to get beyond "the cycle of hatred and violence" (163). Both Buergenthal and Ness's interest in getting beyond the cycle of hatred and violence may signal how Holocaust representation in young people's writing may soon focus more on getting beyond the event than on the event itself. Our desire for stories that tell us that there is always choice even when the historical record and the experience of trauma suggest otherwise is hard to quench, and it is quite likely that one function of Holocaust-inflected speculative fiction will be to satisfy that desire.

[Sidebar]
This essay proposes that Chaos Walking is a trilogy of ideas obsessed with the experience and healing of trauma.
Using the conventions of speculative fiction, Ness probes the relationship between the language of choice and the experience of trauma.
Chaos Walking is not just about the choices characters make; it is also about the debilitating experience of trauma.
Certainly the tension between the discourse of choice and the experience of trauma in Chaos Walking is similar to patterns evident in Holocaust fiction for young people.
Chaos Walking depicts the Holocaust as a dominant but not unique genocidal event, and invokes Holocaust analogies that suggest that the Holocaust, like the word trauma, has entered popular discourse.



[Footnote]
Notes
1 Library of Congress cataloguing data states that social problems, telepathy, and space colonies are examined in all three books. Human-animal communication appears as an additional topic in The Knife of Never Letting Go, and war leads the list of subjects in the final volume, Monsters of Men.
2 Although I refer to the indigenous survivor as 1017 in the context of his personal trauma and as the Sky when he succeeds the former Sky to become leader of the Land, his uncertain identity means that I also refer to him as 1017/the Sky.
3 Although Prentiss appears to be one of the few characters who are not traumatized, we might read his ultimate destruction by the planetary Noise he has tried to control as trauma.
4 See Virginia Euwer Wolff's (1991) The Mozart Season where the heroine's father must spell trauma for her and illustrate its use through several examples (Wolff 66).
5 Ness conveys this visual language by having the Land "show" their thoughts rather than "speak" them.
6 See Adrienne Kertzer (2002), My Mother's Voice: Children, Literature, and the Holocaust (359, note 4).
7 Ness uses different fonts to distinguish the voices of his characters, including the voices of the animals that communicate with the settlers. He also uses italics to signal the non-verbal communication of the Land. The shift from italics to non-italics communicates 1017's uncertain identity; because of his traumatic experiences, he is both haunted by visual traumatic memories and unable to communicate fluently in the visual language of the Land.



[Reference]
Works Cited:
Children's Books
Ness, Patrick. The Ask and the Answer. Chaos Walking, Book 2. Somerville, MA: Candlewick P, 2009. Print.
Ness, Patrick. The Knife of Never Letting Go. Chaos Walking, Book 1. Somerville, MA: Candlewick P, 2008. Print.
Ness, Patrick. Monsters of Men. Chaos Walking, Book 3. Somerville, MA: Candlewick P, 2010. Print.
Ness, Patrick. "Patrick Ness's Top Ten 'Unsuitable' Books for Teenagers" The Guardian. 8 Apr. 2011. Web. 5 June 2011.
Secondary Sources
Alexander, Jeffrey C. "Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma." Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity. Ed. Jeffrey C. Alexander, et al. Berkeley: U of California P, 2004. 1-30. Print.
Buergenthal, Thomas. A Lucky Child: A Memory of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy. Foreword by Elie Wiesel. New York: Back Bay Books- Little, Brown, 2009. Print.
Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996. Print.
Eliot, George. Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life. 1874 New York: Signet Classic-New American Library, 1964. Print.
Freud, Sigmund. 1920. "Beyond the Pleasure Principle." The Penguin Freud Library Volume II: On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis. Ed. Angela Richards. Trans. James Strachey. New York: Penguin, 1991. 269-338. Print.
Halbwachs, Maurice. On Collective Memory. Ed. and Trans. Lewis A. Coser. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992. The Heritage of Sociology. Print.
Higonnet, Margaret R. "Picturing Trauma in the Great War." Under Fire: Childhood in the Shadow of War. Ed. Elizabeth Goodenough and Andrea Immel. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2008. 115-28. Print. Landscapes of Childhood.
Hilliard, Matt. Rev. of "Chaos Walking Trilogy by Patrick Ness." Yet There Are Statues. 26 Apr. 2011. Web. 31 May 2011.
Kertzer, Adrienne. My Mother's Voice: Children, Literature, and the Holocaust. Peterborough, ON: Broadview P, 2002. Print.
Luckhurst, Roger. The Trauma Question. London and New York: Routledge, 2008. Print.
McMaster, Lindsey. "The 'Murray Look': Trauma as Family Legacy in L. M. Montgomery's Emily of New Moon Trilogy." Canadian Children's Literature 34.2 (Autumn 2008): 50-74. Print.
McNally, Richard J. Remembering Trauma. Cambridge, MA: Belknap P-Harvard UP, 2005. Print.
Smelser, Neil J. "Psychological Trauma and Cultural Trauma." Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity. Jeffrey C. Alexander, et al. Berkeley: U of California P, 2004. 31-59. Print.
Stephens, John. Language and Ideology in Children's Fiction. London and New York: Longman, 1992. Print.
Woolf, Virginia. "George Eliot." The Common Reader First Series. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1925. 166-76. Print.
Wolff, Virginia Euwer. The Mozart Season. New York: Henry Holt, 1991. Print.