Flanagan - Girl Land

Margaret, are you grieving

Over Goldengrove unleaving?

Leaves, like the things of man, you

With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?

Ah! as the heart grows older

It will come to such sights colder

By and by, nor spare a sigh

Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;

And yet you will weep and know why.

Now no matter, child, the name:

Sorrows springs are the same.

Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed

What heart heard of, ghost guessed:

It is the blight man was born for,

It is Margaret you mourn for.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1880

E VERY WOMAN IVE KNOWN describes her adolescence as the most psychologically intense period of her life. Her memories of it are vivid: the exquisite friendships and first loves, the ways in which the products of popular culturethe movies and television shows and musicof the day didnt just inform her emotional life but became a part of it. She remembers, too, the particular and bittersweet tenor of the time, the way her teenage years, for which she spent so much of her early life preparing and practicing, constituted an end to her childhood. Emerging into sexual maturity comes with very different realities and vulnerabilities for girls than it does for boys, and the process of entering it is thus more psychologically and emotionally intense. This is Girl Land: the attenuated leave-taking, the gathering awareness of what is being lost forever. Becoming a woman is an act partly of nature and partly of self-invention; Girl Land is the place and time in which all of this is worked out.

The work of Girl Land is eternal and unchanging. We see its signposts across time and cultures: a girls sudden need to withdraw from the world for a while and to inhabit a secret emotional life, is as true of the nineteenth-century British schoolgirl as it is of the American teenager of today. She slips into that private place during her sulks and silences, during her endless hours alone in her room, or even just when shes gazing out the classroom window while all of modern European history, or the niceties of the pass compos, sluice past her. She is a creature designed for a richly lived interior life (and for all the things that come with such a life: reading, writing in a diary, listening to music while she stares out the window and dreams) in a way most boys are not. Her most elemental psychological needsto be undisturbed while she works out the big questions, to be hidden from view while still in plain sight, to have deeply, sometimes unbearably empathic responses to the sorrows and excitements of othersare met precisely through this act of drawing within herself, of disappearing for a while. What is she doing? Shes coming to terms with her emergence as a sexual creature, with everything good and everything frightening that accompanies this transformation. She is also mourning the loss of her little girlhood, in a way that boys typically dont mourn the loss of their childhoods.

One of the signal differences between adolescent girls and boys is that a boy does not fetishize the tokens of his childhood. An eighth-grade boy doesnt catch sight of his old Legos and feel a sudden surge of heartbreak; he either walks right past them or sits down and tinkers with them until something else comes along to distract him. They are not the marker of something lost to him forever. But how many fully liberated young college women will bring something from the lost continent of little girlhood to their new livesthe worn teddy bear that sits, half ironically, on the dorm room dresser; the glass animal bought on the long-ago holiday. These are objects she regards with mixed emotions, emotions that few young men can begin to understand.

The emotional life of a little girl is drenched with romance. Modern mothers, planning to raise independent, strong-minded daughters, are very often confronted with a preschool girls stubborn attraction to princess costumes and stories and toys. A girl entering adolescence is making the discovery that female sexualitya force more complex than she has ever imaginedis intimately enmeshed with romance. A girl at this stage of her life realizes that dreams of being in love, of having a boyfriend, a husband, a family of her own, depend upon sex. The awareness begins with menstruation, something she may have been waiting for eagerly but that brings with it certain raw truths: that emerging female sexuality is intrinsically bound in the blood and profundity that are the truth of human reproduction. The toll and consequence of sexuality fall much more harshly on women than on men, and as a girl enters adolescence this becomes starkly true to her. Furthermore, she learns that with the advent of sexual maturity, she is becoming attractive not just to the boys her age, but also to grown men, some of whom do not mean her well. Sexual danger enters her life, and even the ways in which she is taught to protect herself from it serve to highlight its reality. She longs to be in two places at once: the safety of little girlhood, with the stuffed animals and the jump ropes and the simplicity of childhood, but also in the new place, in the arms of a lover whom she wants to ravish her, to deliver her to new shores. Figuring all of this out is why girls want to spend so much time alone in their bedrooms with the doors closed. One of the biggest problems for parents of these teenagers is that they never know who is going to come barreling out of that sacred space: the adorable little girl who wants to cuddle, or the hard-eyed young woman who has left it all behind.