Individual Text Feature: The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky

Perks of being a Wallflower Individual Text Feature

I hope that The Perks of being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky will one day be considered a classic of YA literature. The book centers on the reflections and stories told by a freshman in high school named Charlie. Charlie relates these thoughts through personal letters always addressed to an anonymous friend. These letters echo the female diary novels we read in class, but are somehow even more personal, as Charlie only knows the letter receiver distantly, but never uses his or other's’ real names so that he may rename anonymous.

While Charlie is by no means the average adolescent, he is highly precocious and emotional, his insightful reflections allow any reader to enter into his reflections and anxieties in a relatable way. He states in his first letter that he is “both happy and sad at the same time, and I am still trying to figure out how that can be,” which seems to be a common contradiction associated with growing up. While Charlie is intellectually sharp and insightful into the way others feel, some things that are common understanding tend to go over his head, and at moments he is seen as infantile by his siblings and peers. A loss of innocence is an important theme in this novel, as he and the other characters grapple with what it means to grow up and become a man or woman.

When Charlie befriends a group of misfit seniors, who are involved in the Rocky Horror Picture Show, reject conventional popularity, and chain-smoke during class, he feels a part of a group for the first time. At a party, his friend Patrick tells him that he is a wallflower: “you see things, you listen, you understand.” This comes to define Charlie’s character as he observes people and relationships around him in order to try to understand the world. The biggest theme in his observations tend to be gender roles and romantic relationships. He listens to the advice of his peers and how other people say men and women are meant to be. He observes relationships of the popular kids at school, his parents, his siblings, and those of his close friends, Patrick and Sam. In the novel there are repeated reinforcement of traditional gender roles as well as intentional transgressions against the norm. The character of Charlie is neither one of intentionally conforming or transgressing: he is an authentic conundrum.

What Charlie sees in the beginning of the novel is the boys in girls in the hallways of his high school. He notices that his former friend from middle school, Emily, who used to date his friend that recently committed suicide. Over the summer, she began to be considered more attractive, and now she has new friends and doesn’t act as smart as she used to. He notices girls wearing their boyfriend’s letterman jackets and he is reminded of the concept of property. He mostly pities them, but hopes that they are happy.

Charlie’s brother threw a house party three years prior, and Charlie witnessed a boy named Dave rape his girlfriend. It haunted him for years, and when he told Sam and Patrick he asked them if it was rape and if he should tell someone. They said no because they were still together and both “popular and very in love.” Charlie gets so angry when he sees them at the homecoming dance together that he lets all of the air out of Dave’s tires.

Charlie also observes his sister’s relationships. He thinks of her as being very mean to boys, until she dates a very sensitive boy named Sean. She continually verbally abuses the boy, and asks him why he doesn’t stand up to his bully and then he slaps her across the face. It is like a switch has been hit and his sister immediately becomes softer and wants to be with Sean more. Their relationship becomes more serious until Charlie tells his teacher, Bill, and Bill calls home to his parents. Then, his sister can only see Sean in secret and this ironically escalates their relationship. She tells Charlie she wants to marry him, and he worries about her.

Charlie learns a lot about manhood from the men in his family. His father played college baseball until his mother got pregnant and he had to quit, and his brother goes on to play football at Penn State that year. Sports and masculinity seem to be closely associated in his family. Charlie has never seen his father cry but one time. They were watching the last episode of M*A*S*H as a family and his father left the room to make a sandwich. When Charlie sees him crying his father encourages him to keep it as “our little secret.” This becomes the only close moment Charlie has shared with his father. At Christmas, Charlie gets anxious while shopping for his father’s present because he doesn’t know what to buy him and realizes that he really doesn’t know his father. In the end, he decides to buy him the episode of M*A*S*H on cassette. His brother dates cheerleaders and keeps posters of supermodels up in his room, but Charlie hoped that he would date a girl in college who is “unconventionally beautiful.”

When Charlie befriends Sam and Patrick, Patrick acquaints him with the “rules of how things work.” He explains that girls learn how to think and act from TV shows, magazines, and the movies they see. He says they want a guy who will give them a purpose, the way that being a mom gives a woman a purpose. Patrick, Sam, and their friends, Alice, Mary Elizabeth, and Bob, tend to transgress the norms they see being adopted by their peers. All of them act or direct the Rocky Horror Picture Show and its publication. Patrick sustains a secret romantic relationship with Brad, the school quarterback. Mary Elizabeth and Alice sport tattoos, piercings, wear their hair in a way “that makes people mad,” and have been following Buddhist teachings for 6 months. Patrick explains that he and Sam used to be popular until they started listening to good music.

Charlie exists as someone who seems to be aware of the influence of these institutions on him and his peers and his ability to rebel against them, but decides to neither conform nor rebel. This ability is one of the benefits of his wallflower status. Charlie played sports as a kid, and he was athletically gifted, but doctors advised his mother to pull him from sports because they made him too aggressive. Charlie is a boy in school who gets verbally bullied until he has to physically defend himself, and ends up really hurting the other boy, but cries because he did not want to.  He is also very protective of people who are vulnerable, such as the girl dancing with her boyfriend of four years at the dance. Charlie settles on letting airs out of his tire because he knew it would be wrong to beat up the boy in that moment, and that he may be unable to stop himself. He is extremely attracted to Sam, but tries his best to respect her wishes that he “not think of her that way.”

To conclude, the influence of the institution of traditional femininity and masculinity on adolescents as they try to attain maturity is prevalent in the novel. People such as his sister and classmates attempt to assimilate into roles modeled for them by their parents and the media. People like those in his friend group actively try to be rebellious toward these institutions. Charlie remains somewhere outside of these influences. He sees things, he listens, and he understands, but as his teacher Bill puts it, he needs to try to “participate” more. However, because Charlie is a wallflower, he has the power to exist outside of conforming or rebelling to gender roles.