Mariah Ryan's Response Paper #2, Prompt 3

Eleanor and Park: Analyzing Teenage Love Through the Novel’s Complex Situations

            Many educators are reluctant to teach seemingly simple texts with fear their students will not gain the superior educational experience they desire the pupils to have. Novels such as Great Expectations or To Kill a Mockingbird hold great value in English classrooms. Teachers may believe contemporary young adult (YA) novels are mundane or fail to exhibit the complexities novels need to thoroughly evaluate students’ knowledge. However, with the new push to introduce YA novels in the classroom, teachers are finding themselves hustling to build a library of age-appropriate YA novels for their students to dive into. Rainbow Rowell’s novel, Eleanor and Park, showcases how beautiful young love can be whilst the characters are in the mix of intense personal situations they struggle with daily. Furthermore, Eleanor and Park both share a deep connection that is limited by their familial circumstances that many students can find relevance in, even given the 30 years difference between the published date and the current society. I assert Eleanor and Park’s newfound love is what makes this novel relatable in the classroom, while the complicated social issues both characters face gives the novel its complexity teachers need to have in their literature classes.

            The sense of helplessness and being lost runs wild throughout Eleanor and Park as both young teens journey through a world of adversity. Eleanor is poor and has been introduced to a home life where she feels unloved and unwanted. While Park is fortunate enough to have a loving family, he feels like an outcast due to his ethnicity and later his love for Eleanor. In an article by Linda Holmes, she points out that Eleanor and Park’s teenage love “makes them feel less lost” (Holmes, “True Love”). While many of the issues the characters face in the novel might be inappropriate for middle school readers, I do believe many high school students would relate immensely to the idea of one’s first love. High school is a tough transition for many young adults; the new idea that one isn’t a child anymore because they have four years left before the real world, gaining some ground on their identity, and experiencing those around them as potential love interests makes many individuals feel lost and alone. It is easy to believe that finding one person who clicks with you on every level, and an attraction is mutually share among the two, would help any high schooler feel complete and safe. Readers can see Eleanor and Park experiencing one another in new ways during an intense intimate moment in Park’s parents’ house.  Rowell describes Park’s desire for Eleanor to touch him “like a cat who pushes its head under your hands” as Eleanor “brought her hands down Park’s chest with her fingertips” (Rowell, 250). This new and lustful love the two share makes many adult readers today reminisce about their first boyfriend or girlfriend and what it was like to be placed in an intimate situation for the first time. The way Rowell depicts the encounter between the two as “awkward” in comparison to how “in movies, [intimate relations] happens smoothly or comically” (Rowell, 250). This situation will have teenagers thinking closely to their own relationships they are currently in, or have experience already in the past. The ability to relate to a situation is what makes the novel work in the classroom—it helps keep the students engaged in what they are reading and they are able to compare what is going on in the text to their own lives. This is one aspect that allows teachers to use YA novels as a tool for complex thinking.

            Teachers want students to read a text and analyze complex issues as a method of assessing higher order thinking. As stated before, one of the biggest arguments about YA novels are the lack of complexities embedded into the storyline. Contrary to this belief, Eleanor and Park not only exhibits conflict, but also very intense and difficult situations that teachers can use for deep instruction. While the controversies that are describe in the novel are tough and sensitive, students can practice empathy and critical thinking about these issues in the context of Eleanor and Park’s young romance. For example, Rowell lets the readers into Eleanor and Park’s intimate scenario when Park asks Eleanor if their relationship is “going to be weird now” and Eleanor replies, “only for a minute, only a little” (Rowell, 253). The encounter they both experienced together is new, it is complex because neither knows what to think about what happened besides they care for one another—Park even explicated tells Eleanor during it that he loves her—and that they both feel pleasure from being touched. Rowell lets the situation become even deeper as the readers peer into Eleanor’s fears that she might “never [have] the chance to touch him like this again” (Rowell, 250). The readers are forced to think about Eleanor’s home life and how each day with Park might be the last; this is partly due to her stepfather being increasingly more violent towards Eleanor, leaving her with the choice to stay and endure potential death/rape or to run away and find safety with her aunt and uncle in Minnesota. The readers are able to see the struggles both Park, and especially Eleanor, face internally and externally. Their relationship becomes more complex as it develops more romantically throughout the chapters.

            Rowell’s Eleanor and Park gives adults an inside advantage of teenage struggles all while providing an outlet for those same teens to feel not so alone. This novel works very well in a classroom because of its content and deep rooted issues the characters are forced to deal with. It is because of the sensitive nature of the novel that students can feel they aren’t alone in their search for a better life or knowing their true identity. The love Eleanor and Park share can be transmitted for young adults in their own romantic relationships by Rowell providing a detailed explanation of the two characters as individuals and as a romantic pair. Teachers are able to use YA novels like Eleanor and Park to meet state standards, engage their students with an interesting storyline, and analyzing complex issues and ideas found in the novel. Through the relationship we watch unfold between the two, Eleanor and Park leave the readers with many questions about the future of the relationship, but ultimately hope that both are better because of the experiences they had while in each other’s presence.     

Works Cited

Holmes, Linda. “True Love, Book Fights, and Why Ugly Stories Matter.” NPR. NPR, 18 Sept. 2013.              Web. 31 May 2016.                                            http://www.npr.org/sections/monkeysee/2013/09/18/223738674/true-love-book-fights-and-why-              ugly-stories-matter

Rowell, Rainbow. Eleanor and Park. New York, St. Martin’s Press, 2013. Print.