Paul Zindel, changing times, and Young Adult Drama

Paul Zindel lived during the later half of the 20th century.  This was a period of change in America.  With the end of the second world war, American culure reorganized itself in many ways to become both fully modernized and primarily consumer based.  One aspect that became increasingly popular with the end of the second world war was the effect of radiation on various things.  Before it was discovered that radioactivity was poisonous, Radium and other radioactive elements were used in consumer products (one example is a story I heard in Chemistry of wristwatches that had radium paint on the dials so would glow in the dark.  The workers who painted these watches ended up with severe problems as a result, including some with forked tongues from where they would lick the point of the paint brush to make the brush pointy).  Today Americium is commonly used in smoke detectors, but apparently hasn't any serious risks of radiation poisoning. 

The premise of The Effects of Gamma Rays on Man-In-The-Moon Marigolds follows a mother and her two daughters as the go about their daily lives.  The mother, however, does not think the girls should be going to school.  She believes that they should be attending to their domestic duties.  One daughter, Tillie (short for Matilda) is an intelligent student who is enthusiastic about science.  The other daughter, Tillie has been kept home for so long that the school is calling on account of her truency.  The mother, Beatrice, displays typical anti-intellectual attitudes, especially towards the daughters' schooling.

This play occurs during a period of time when America was shifting into post-modernity.  To that extent, there is a disconnect between the parent, who belongs to an era before mass education and the children who are living in a time of intellectual freedom as well as an approaching civil equality between the sexes.  Zindel has done an affective job at characterizing the post-nuclear family: the father is absent, dead since the beginning of the story, the daughters each come to represent a different attitude of their generation, and the mother is clinging to conventional ideas about the sexes and what women should and should not be doing.  This is a theme to watch out for in YA literature. 

Younger readers should sympathize to some degree with the daughters and the conflicting authority figures between home and school.  The genre of young adult literature arose out of the desire to portray those young people who are both caught between the margin of child and adult, but also for those who might still be children if not for adult circumstances forcing them into maturity.  This is one of the touchstones of YA literature, showing young people, too old to be children or too mature to be thought of as children, caught in a difficult situation that they must learn to handle like adults.  The situations are not realistic in all cases, but they present a kind of life that may be true for some, but all will empathize with.  In the case with The Effects of Gamma Rays on Man-In-The-Moon Marigolds perhaps creates a caricature of anachronistic attitudes post-WWII, but it vividly expresses some of the dangers of those attitudes when they are allowed to play out.