Impoverished Heroines and Creating Community in Eleanor and Park

On top of the daily challenges of adolescence, children today deal with a plethora of adult issues such as poverty, deteriorating family situations, death, abuse, and addiction. Many adolescents that deal with these issues have no outlet into which they can filter their troubles and frustrations, and often these children are ostracized, ignored, or isolated. It is from the sometimes arrogant but most likely ignorant point of view that many teachers write off these adolescents as being just bad kids. Instead of writing off a student who has the warning signs of abuse or neglect, teachers should work to open conversation with students about what they may be dealing with both inside and outside the walls of the classroom. English teachers are especially fortunate because they can use text choice as a springboard into having conversations about topics that may to lead students being unfairly labeled. When teachers choose texts that directly address the issues their students face, the classroom can become a place of sharing and a place that students can use as an outlet to filter their troubles and frustrations in a constructive manner. Because it honestly portrays real world issues that teenaged children struggle with, Rainbow Rowell’s Eleanor and Park is one such novel that invites teachers and students to examine social issues that impact them, and have meaningful discussions about those issues.

Rowell’s novel deals with poverty and social stratification in such a way that the novel gives the reader a sincere picture of what if feels like to be desperately poor. Throughout the novel, the reader gets the sense that the setting is a mediocre community in Omaha that is neither rich nor poor, but contains people from the very low earning income tax bracket, such as Eleanor’s family, to the middle class tax bracket, such at Park’s family. Eleanor represents the most impoverished character in the book. At one point in the novel, the reader really feels her desperations when she observes that had her friends not been there to witness it, Eleanor “might have kept some of the pads . . . because, God, what a waste” (51). That a 16-year-old girl would be willing to save sanitary napkins that were put onto her locker as a cruel prank speaks volume to the level of poverty in which she lives. Many girls complain about having to wear hand-me-down clothes, or clothing that is not from a designer name; Eleanor mourns the poor luck of not being able to save opened feminine hygiene products. Later in the novel, Eleanor gives up her Christmas money in order to allow her mother more freedom in purchasing food that can be squirreled away without her stepfather knowing. Her family has limited resources, but she does not complain. Instead of reacting in a surly way to her poverty, Eleanor simply survives. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, “more than 16 million children, or roughly one in five, were living in poverty in 2011” (Breslow). According to this statistic, teachers will definitely have students whose annual income is below the poverty line. By teaching a book like Eleanor and Park  and having honest conversations about the daily challenges of poverty, teachers could have a positive effect on impoverished students by giving them a heroine to look up to; a heroine with whom they can identify. In bringing a poor heroine into the classroom, teachers can also create empathy amongst peers for the impoverished living in the United States.

Eleanor and Park also deals extensively with the idea of community and what it means to be a community. Rowell’s book contains a very dynamic example of community members and through Richie’s treatment, the reader can infer what community is for the residents in Eleanor and Park. The reader finds out through Park’s father that Richie is a native of the community and “isn’t an easy man to be around” (169). We also get the sense from Park’s dad that Richie is not welcomed in the community. Even Tina, Eleanor’s arch nemesis does not rise to the occasion to rat Eleanor out, and instead chooses to insult Richie, while Steve offers to kill him for Eleanor. The sudden turn of events that takes the class bullies from adding to Eleanor’s pain to attempting to protect her from further harm demonstrates that community is not just the people that live in the same area, but the people that share experiences with one another. Tina’s stepfather is apparently from the same strand of stepfathers that Richie hails, and through this shared experience, the girls from a bond, albeit short lived; they become a part of a community together, and it is Tina and Steve that ultimately save Eleanor by giving her a place to hide until the more sensical Park can stop her from running away out of blind terror and without a plan. By sharing experiences, the kids of Eleanor and Park build a community that centers around shred experience and the need for protection.

Rainbow Rowell’s book Eleanor and Park uses the internal dialogue of an impoverished 16-year-old girl to create a heroine that many adolescents can empathize with, resulting in a novel that allows teachers to engage in conversations about the issues that affect their students.

I think that the novel could be particularly successful in a classroom that emphasizes service learning. Eleanor and Park can function as a narrative text that starts conversations about affecting change and helping some of the most endangered citizens of our society, the impoverished, as well as helping students understand that community is a shared experience that needs to be protected. Through opening dialogues, teachers can use the book to motivate students to become active in speaking up for the poor, the abused, and the bullied in their own communities. It can easily be co-taught with non-fiction texts such as Dave Palzer’s A Child Called It. Rowell’s book is an adaptable work that could be used to create many talking points in the classroom.

Works Cited

Breslow, Jason M. “By the Numbers: Childhood Poverty in the U.S.” Poor Kids 20 November 2012: PBS Frontline. Web. 4 June 2015. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/social-issues/poor-kids/by-the-numbers-childhood-poverty-in-the-u-s/.

Rowell, Rainbow. Eleanor and Park. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2013. eBook.