Alex Gino's "Melissa" and the Gendered Bounds of Emotionality

     On its surface, Alex Gino's novel, Melissa, is a rather simple tale about a young trans person coming to terms with her identity and learning how to advocate for herself, even when she does not have the support from key figures in her life like her mother and her teacher. Within it, however, there is a deeper question about the gendered bounds of emotionality and how society associates one's gender identity (or perceived gender identity) and one's capacity for emotions like sympathy, empathy, and understanding.

    Melissa's favorite novel is Charlotte's Web, and the character with whom she most resonates is Charlotte the spider. Melissa loves Charlotte so much that, when Charlotte dies at the end of the book, she bursts into tears, both in sadness over the character's death and in reverence for Charlotte's kindness and wisdom. When Melissa is then picked on by Rick and Jeff for expressing her emotions in a way that seems unbecoming for someone whom others perceive as a fourth-grade boy, her teacher, Ms. Udell, steps in and says this to her: "...it takes a special person to cry over a book. It shows compassion as well as imagination...Don't ever lose that, George, and I know you'll turn into a fine young man" (Gino 15). The narrator then reveals this: "The word man hit me like a pile of rocks falling on [Melissa's] head" (16). Melissa's pain is twofold in this scene: she first is ridiculed by her fellow classmates for demonstrating a capacity for compassion for a fictional character, i.e. doing something traditionally emotionally feminine despite being perceived as masculine. The second wave of pain comes after Ms. Udell qualifies her compassion as becoming of a young man, which validates Melissa's emotional outpouring but encodes it in a gendered way that does not fit with her own gender identity. This is then compounded and worsened when, in the audition, Melissa rebelliously gives Charlotte's soliloquy instead of Wilbur's, the role for which she was forced to audition because it is a male role. Ms. Udell's reaction is anything but sympathetic: "Was that supposed to be some kind of joke? because it wasn't very funny" (70). Ms. Udell, upon recognizing that Melissa's affinity for Charlotte has crossed the boundary between expressing sympathy for the character and wanting to actually be the character, no longer supports Melissa and her chosen mode of expression.

    These two scenes are very important for Melissa's character development and one of the key messages of Gino's entire book. They demonstrate to Melissa that, because of how others perceive her and her gender identity, she is forced to live in a limbo of emotionality and expression. If she doesn't express her emotions, she would be doing a disservice to herself and her own identity. If she does express her emotions, she will either be mocked by her peers who have a narrowminded view of emotionality and gender norms or her emotionality will be qualified in a gendered way that is antithetical to her identity. However, if she decides to express her emotionality and her desire to present as/associate with the gender opposite to that of others' perception of her, she will then be discouraged from acknowledging her emotions at all. While Gino's book may be intended and written as digestible for a younger audience, Melissa often contains these moments that demonstrate a deep and thoughtful rumination on the intersection of gender presentation and codes of social emotional behavior.