The university degree thesis discusses three diary novels by the English writer Sue Townsend (1946-2014) - The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 3/4 (1982), The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole (1984) and The True Confessions of Adrian Albert Mole (1989) - in the context of the dominant socio-political paradigm of England in the 1980s. We understand the texts as instances of crossover literature, but we also demonstrate that the novels are not merely examples of (light) "adolescent and young adult fiction", as their potential in terms of genre seems to be sharper. The texts can be perceived as socio-political satire that is narrated by a specific narrator: the unreliable - naive and/or deluded - narrator. The thesis presents the concept of neoliberalism, more specifically Thatcherism, which we define as the socio-economic political agenda of Margaret Thatcher (1925-2013) during her time as the Prime Minister of the UK between 1979 and 1990. In light of the social consequences of Thatcherism we outline the fictional world of Adrian Mole, the central character of the literary texts under discussion. First, we analyse the socio-economically underprivileged position of Adrian's family and his political growing up, during which period his diary entries gradually include ever clearer instances of criticism of Margaret Thatcher. We present the satirical potential of the texts through an analysis of the literary characters of the headmaster Mr Scruton and Adrian's grandmother, both of whom we see as grotesque Thatcherite mouthpieces. The structural position occupied by the threat of Communism in Thatcherite ideology is represented, in Adrian's fictional world, by Bert Baxter, a vulgar but benign old man. Then we move on to criticism of militarism, which can be observed through the narrator's comments on the Falklands War (1982). We also point to Adrian's naive attitude towards the monarchy. The thesis concludes with a presentation of Adrian's understanding of the processes of his mother's and his girlfriend's emancipation, where we show that the narrator's feminist maturity does not correlate with his political maturity.
|
