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Abstract:
Laurie Halse Anderson's Speak tells the story of teenager Melinda Sorvino's rape, recovery, and eventual coming out as a rape victim. The novel is remarkable in that it reflects the queerness of the strategies Melinda uses to effect her recovery, strategies that, paradoxically, serve both to suppress her voice and to help her recover/discover a voice with which she can speak the truth. Speak is thus a queer novel in that, by presenting a view from the closet, it questions and subverts dominant heterosexist assumptions about gender, identity, and trauma.
Speak, Laurie Halse Anderson's Michael L. Printz Honor Book, can be read as a coming-out story. The novel tells the story of Melinda Sordino, who, during the summer before her freshman year in high school, is raped at a party by an older boy who goes to the same school Melinda will attend in the fall. After the attack, Melinda, knowing that she needs help, calls the police, but when the dispatcher answers the phone, she is unable to speak. When everyone discovers that Melinda has called the police-although they do not know why-they ostracize her. Still, in spite of the anger, pain, and loneliness she feels, she cannot bring herself to tell anyone what really happened that night. Instead, she retreats-literally and metaphorically-into a closet in order to keep people from learning the truth and to help her cope with her trauma.
Melinda's narrative, recounting her experiences as an outcast and her slow journey toward recovery, is by turns painful, smart, and darkly comic. What is interesting about it, though, is not so much that it reflects her (re)construction of her identity, but that in so doing it reflects the queerness of the strategies she uses to effect her recovery, strategies that, paradoxically, serve both to suppress her voice and to help her recover/discover a voice with which she can speak the truth. Speak is thus a queer novel in that, by presenting a view from the closet, it questions and subverts dominant heterosexist assumptions about gender, identity, and trauma.
Trauma
One way of approaching Anderson's novel is to see Melinda's behavior as symptomatic of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). As outlined by psychiatrist Judith Herman in her groundbreaking book Trauma and Recovery:...