Ghost World: “You’ve grown into a very beautiful young woman.”

In anticipation of the forthcoming release of Daniel Clowes’s Ghost World: Special Edition, I take a close look at the comic’s closing line of dialogue: “You’ve grown into a very beautiful young woman.” As is so often the case in Clowes’s writing, one seemingly simple line opens into many possible meanings and connects to several threads that run throughout the work. It’s a perfect ending phrase in so many ways, a few of which I discuss here.

Consistent with Enid’s interest in exploring different personas, the line has a slightly staged quality, as if she had heard it in an old movie (the kind other teens would never watch) and senses that it’s the kind of thing you say -- the kind of sentiment you want to feel -- to mark the finality of a closing scene, the end of a romance. You desire to acknowledge (to yourself and an imaginary audience who would no doubt approve, you believe) the power of the scene that you are participating in and creating. The heightened drama of this moment is also nicely evoked as Clowes sets Enid against a background of dense and billowy clouds, a romanticized way to accent the moment and a visual approach that Clowes uses elsewhere:
Enid’s words, though, are more than stagey; they are undoubtedly sincere. But while she speaks her appreciation for Rebecca aloud, Rebecca can’t possibly hear it, a kind of failure to communicate that is the final act -- or so it seems -- of their troubled friendship. (Many Clowes protagonists often confess to readers things they fail to share with those who most need to know them.) Clowes marks this change in their relationship by having Rebecca’s look change: she’s wearing glasses (previously Enid’s trademark), the appearance of which he had set up a few pages earlier with a short but symbolically loaded scene in which Rebecca discusses the trouble she’s having with her eyes.

Enid is literally fading from Rebecca’s -- and shortly from the readers' and her author’s -- view.

Is Enid’s line equally, or perhaps only, about herself or her belief -- or need to believe -- that she has naturally “grown into,” rather than consciously adopted, a look? She is dressed in her most refined and feminine outfit, with little hint of the more extreme styles, especially the punk looks, that were a source of pride -- and anxiety -- for her earlier in the comic. This outfit is also her most “adult,” an important choice given her intense investment in her childhood, which is seen, for example, in her deep attachment to a toy given to her by a boy in the 5th grade, and a children’s 45 that she listens to:


These lyrics seem to express Enid’s fundamental desire: like the singer of "A Smile and a Ribbon," she wants to be thought of as something "special" and "rare," foreshadowing the way she talks of Rebecca when she calls her a "beautiful young woman."

To say “You’ve grown into a very beautiful young woman” is to position yourself as an adult, as one capable of recognizing, understanding, and appreciating this growth. Yet I wonder if this is what Enid really wants to say, if this carefully crafted sentiment masks something less pleasant -- and we have seen a steady increase in the tension in their friendship. Three pages earlier, Enid watches a child being cared for by its mother and quietly says aloud “You little fucker.” The child has what she wants: a caring mother.

And does Rebecca, sitting in Angels with Josh, have what Enid wants, as well? In the closing scene, Rebecca and Josh occupy the place where Enid and Rebecca had spent so much time. Enid, it seems, has been replaced.
[page 48]
But Rebecca is distracted, as shown by her chewed straw.
Is she thinking, not about Josh (she’s not looking at him), but about Enid? Their connection is so strong that we can easily imagine each would be thinking about the other at the same moment. . .


It also seems oddly ironic and fitting that, while the stimulus for Enid’s decision to leave is the return of her father’s ex-wife (who she hates), her failure to get into college, and the changes in her friendship with Rebecca, she is also inspired by two the typically odd Clowes characters Bob Skeetes and “Norman” (the name Enid gives him), both of whom haunt the margins of Ghost World, but exert an inexorable pull on Enid. Like Clowes, Enid finds these kinds of outsiders compelling, and they are crucial characters even if their “screen time” is very limited; these characters seem minor, but are in fact major. Skeetes offers an astrological reading of Enid that’s vague (like most such readings), yet specific enough that it tells a kind of truth about Enid and the crossroad at which she finds herself. And it predicts/inspires the choice she will make in the last scene: “she’s running away.”

We can barely see Norman in the left of the story's penultimate panel (is he just riding the bus around town and going nowhere -- and is this what happens to Enid after she “escapes our scrutiny?”). Earlier, the girls realize that Norman, who was always waiting for a bus that never came, finally had taken the bus in the last panel of page 52, a scene that foreshadows, and perhaps encourages, Enid’s ‘escape’:

[The final view of Enid, one of the few silhouettes in the comic.]

Perhaps Enid is interested in these kinds of characters because they seem to be beyond growth; they are interesting in and of themselves and have no need to “grow into” anything. And they certainly appear to be beyond the many personal and social pressures that shape Enid and Rebecca.

In this kind of coming of age story, we expect that a main character will grow up in some way, will come into a new kind of understanding about the world. But the kind of growth that matters most here might be the growing apart. “Growing into a very beautiful young woman” means Rebecca is moving away from Enid. (The line is also odd because Enid often had commented on Rebecca's attractiveness, which made Enid, who's uncomfortable with her own looks, unhappy.) And if Rebecca has adopted a more conventional engagement with the world (on the last page she is depicted inside while Enid is alone outside) is Enid moving away from it? And towards what?

The growth is visually set up and balanced -- and perhaps even undermined -- by a subtle and literal sign of decay that we can trace throughout the story: we have seen the sign for Angel’s (a place closely associated with Enid) lose letters since the novel opened.

And here’s another sign that carries a similarly symbolic weight: the sign for school children.
Tellingly, Enid is walking away from the school, in the opposite direction of what this sign represents (childhood, nostalgia, safety . . .) and away from nearly everyone else in the scene (which occurs shortly before the final line of dialogue). We also see the backs of two Clowes characters, Squirrel Girl and Candy-Pants (from Eightball), who are a kind of younger, more playful version of the Enid and Rebecca pair. If Enid, like Rebecca, has grown into a young woman, she has to leave everything behind her -- childhood toys and records, Rebecca and Josh -- or so she believes . . .



[Musical side note: Enid listens to the Ramones and Clowes did the art for a Ramones video “I Don’t Want To Grow Up,” a sentiment that is in tension with Ghost World’s last line. Here's a link to "A Smile and a Ribbon" and to Clowes's Ramones video. ]