It is rare for a story featuring a teenage girl to be considered a “classic” novel. Sure, there are tons of books starring teenagers. They become TV series like Gossip Girl or movie franchises like Sisterhood of Traveling Pants or The Princess Diaries. There’s nothing wrong with any of those shows or movies, of course, but they’re certainly considered “girly” shows and are clearly intended for a female teen audience.
It is unlikely that the Gossip Girl or Princess Diaries novels will ever be considered required reading for any grade level, nor that Scholastic or any other educational publisher will ever create teacher resources for the Teaching the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants books.” That’s fine, not all books are designed to be taught in schools or to stand the test of time.
However, several novels featuring teens are required reading in high school and even college. It’s not weird at all. Featuring arguably the most obnoxious teenage male lead of all time, Holden Caulfield, The Catcher in the Rye is standard in just about any high school English classroom in America.
Just to be clear, this is not an argument that the Gossip Girl or Traveling Pants books have the same level of quality as Catcher in the Rye. Clearly, JD Salinger was a gifted writer, and his works have an important place in the American literary canon. It makes sense that they should be taught in schools, and for some reason it seems that reading the story of the almost impossibly smug and immature Holden Caulfield is an important aspect of the traditional American high school educational experience. Excellent. It’s just, books written about teenage girls are usually written for other teenage girls to read. For some reason, it’s rare to read a coming-of-age novel about an American teenage girl that isn’t considered a fluffy or “girly” book.
Sure there’s Charlotte Bronte’s classic Jane Eyre and the collected works of Jane Austen, which feature almost exclusively the plight of young women, but these novels are written in other countries and centuries. There really isn’t a female equivalent to The Catcher in the Rye or even The Outsiders. It is almost impossible to imagine a female equivalent of The Outsiders. A novel written about the trials and tribulations of a group of teenage women in that time period would likely have been dismissed as frivolous from the start. Critics may have called it “Judy Blume in a leather jacket” or something else insultingly dismissive.
Again, this is not a criticism of The Outsiders. It’s another beautiful book, with much less hateful teenagers than The Catcher in the Rye to begin with. The incorporation of Robert Frost’s poem “Nothing Gold Can Stay” was really clever, and characters like Pony Boy are the reason this country forces its teenagers to read fiction in the first place. It would be nice if the teenage girls in those high school classes could see more stories about women their age in required reading.
