Two Novels About Teenage Girls: Penance & Our Lady of the Nile

Is there any social group in contemporary fiction that’s written about as often, and yet so consistently misrepresented, as teenage girls? As I’ve argued before, books about teenage girls that are aimed at adults tend to evoke ‘feverish’ and ‘febrile’ social circles, presenting female adolescence as ‘fragile and dangerous, frightening and vulnerable’. It’s a classic example of how young people are always presented as victims or threats: sweet and innocent, or dark behind the mask.  Nevertheless, I’m always on the hunt for fiction that presents teenagers as people, perhaps people who are stuck in an unusually claustrophobic social situation – imagine if adults were forced to attend an institution with others their own age, day in, day out, and judged by how they coped? – but people, nonetheless.

In their own ways, Eliza Clark and Scholastique Mukasonga both achieve this – despite focusing on teenage girls who either directly commit torture and murder, or deliberately incite it. Clark’s Penance is a fictionalised true-crime narrative put together by journalist Alec Carelli, looking for his next big hit after his last two books flopped. It explores the horrific killing of sixteen-year-old Joan by three of her classmates in a run-down seaside town in north-east England, and digs deep into their complicated real-life friendship networks, with grudges, loyalties and rivalries dating back to primary school, as well as Tumblr, Insta and creepypasta online cultures. Carelli wants to present Joan’s murder as a result of the three perpetrators’ interest in the occult and in earlier crimes committed by juveniles, obsessively examining school shooting fanfics and search histories that reveal a fascination with online horror stories like ‘The Russian Sleep Experiment’.

But as teens of my generation know as well as teens of the 2010s, ‘goth’ cultures or ‘satanism’ are often mistakenly blamed for infamous juvenile crimes like the Columbine high school shooting. Clark invites us to read between the lines of Carelli’s account to see how the girls’ actions may have been rooted in different, IRL, motives: childhood abuse, neglectful parenting, back-and-forth bullying, earlier traumatic death, and sexual jealousy. It appeals to adult imaginations to believe that teens do bad things because of ‘The Internet’, allowing us to hark back to a supposedly idyllic pre-internet age; this also means we don’t have to take their friendships and enmities seriously, or accept that what happens at school really matters.

In a very different way, Mukasonga’s Our Lady of the Nile (trans. Melanie Mauthner) is also invested in emphasising that schools are not isolated communities, and that childhood and adolescence are not that different from adulthood. Set in Rwanda in the late 1970s, this episodic novel focuses on a group of schoolgirls in their final year at the Catholic lycée Our Lady of the Nile. It’s fifteen years before the Rwandan genocide, but tensions between Hutu and Tutsi play out in microcosm among these teenagers. Historically, the Tutsi, who were already in power positions when the country was colonised in the late nineteenth century, were further favoured by Belgian colonial rule, stereotyped as a more ‘European’ race than the Hutu. Hutu resentment led to anti-Tutsi feeling, which accelerated after the death of the Tutsi king in 1959 and independence in 1962, leading to repeated massacres of Tutsis. This plays out in Our Lady of the Nile, with an ethnic quota system allocating only two places in the final year for Tutsi girls, who are bullied and excluded by their classmates. Nevertheless, as in Penance, Mukasonga keeps this bad feeling relatively light until the final chapters; the girls’ actions could be written off as teenage silliness until they abruptly become deadly serious, and the facade of the lycée unpeels before our eyes.

Penance is so impressive partly because it’s utterly gripping and partly because it feels so real. I was a teen in the early 00s rather than the mid-2010s, but replace Tumblr with LiveJournal and creepypasta with dark Harry Potter fanfiction, and I was suddenly back in my all-girls’ comprehensive school, remembering how carefully we kept tabs on what had happened in the past, and how online cultures may have been grim but offered a welcome escape. (Also, one of the characters may create a ‘torture dungeon’ in Sims 4, but given that everybody I knew who played Sims 1 took the ladder off the swimming pool so their Sims were forced to swim back and forth until they died, I found it hard to judge – I even named one of my Sim victims after a girl I disliked at school 🙃 🙃 ) Clark treads a difficult line here, but I think, in the end, she manages to make these girls into people – I especially liked how she wrote self-aware Jayde, a teenage lesbian who has little time for online drama, and sensible Lauren, a relatively popular girl who tries to encourage her friends to be kinder. In contrast, Mukasonga’s girls are often defined by their ethnic identity and social situation, and dialogue can be info-dumpy, but a couple stand out: I loved Immaculée, a Hutu girl who we first meet when she arrives at school on her boyfriend’s motorbike in tight clothing, but who also organises an expedition to see the local gorillas and maintains friendships with the Tutsi girls.

One of Joan’s murderers writes about how she wanted to create a ‘pocket hell’ in their seaside town, and it would be easy to say that going to an all-girls’ school, or indeed any kind of secondary school, is a kind of pocket hell. But I don’t think this is what Clark, or Mukasonga, are trying to say. Instead, their fictional institutions play out as microcosms of wider society, just more concentrated, and more intense, because of the peculiar ways in which schools function. Schools may be bad places, but that isn’t because teenagers are bad people: it’s because of the artificial social situation we make them navigate at the same time as telling them (sometimes truthfully) that this is the period of their life that determines their entire future. The Tutsi girls might have escaped Our Lady of the Nile, but this didn’t feel like a choice they could make at the time. As one of them puts it, ‘I’m not leaving the lycée without my diploma. Give up so close to the diploma? Never.’