Releve Jenna, Releve

An Essay on The Adoration of Jenna Fox 

Ballet—the perfect art.  There is a perfect height, perfect weight, perfect grace, and perfect feet expected of every prima ballerina.  Every step is perfect, beautiful, and graceful there is no room for improvisation. Only the perfect ballerina’s can please audiences.  Jenna Fox, the protagonist in Mary E. Pearson’s The Adoration of Jenna Fox, is the ballet of her parent’s world.  Jenna feels she must do everything perfect in order to stay on the pedestal her parents have created for her.  If she falls she disappoints her audience, which will cause her to break.  She is controlled by the love of her parents until they push her too far to the edge of the pedestal.  Though she falls she doesn’t break; Jenna realizes she can find more peace in life when she does what she needs instead of living up to her parents expectations.

Jenna obeys to please.  When she wakes up from her year and a half long coma she does things only to please her mother.  “[Mother] puts her arm around me and squeezes.  I lift the corner of my mouth.  Then the other: a smile.  Because I know I am supposed to.  It is what she wants” (Pearson 3).  Because she doesn’t have a high functioning brain yet, Jenna doesn’t understand why she does things to please her parents.  But even before the accident and ensuing coma, Jenna’s body took command of her, which aimed to please her parents.

In her last ballet recital she only finished her dance gracefully to stay on the pedestal her parents had created.   On stage Jenna is tempted to “stomp and grind and swing [her] hips” (Pearson 229) instead of preforming her last releve.  But she releves.  Her mind wants so desperately to do something else, but her body won’t let her.  It is woven into her muscles to stay on the pedestal.  The “new Jenna,” upon watching her last performance, realizes how unhappy she was staying on her parent’s pedestal.  “The performance is all in her arms and legs and muscles, and none of it is in her heart” (Pearson 229).  Jenna stays on her pedestal because she is afraid of disappointing her parents;  “Maybe I was eager for a fall, the thing I feared most” (Pearson 225).  After her coma, once she realized she was placed on a pedestal, she again battles with what she wants and what her parents want.  Lily tells her, “[Your parents] won’t break, you know” when Jenna is having a hard time coming to terms with this fact. (Pearson 232). It is this assumption that leads Jenna to always releve instead of stop and grind. 

It is not only Jenna’s fault that she stayed on the pedestal before her accident and after it.  Her parents never listened to her, nor gave her what she really needed.  Jenna told Clair she wanted a red skirt (Pearson 233).  Though Clair told Jenna she would get her one, she never did because “It’s not important.  It never really was” (Pearson 236).  This suggests that what Jenna wants never was important.  It was always what her mom and dad wanted.  Jenna says,

“All of your pieces fill up other people’s holes.

But they don’t fill

your own” (Pearson 231).

It was Lily alone who saw this.  She saw what Jenna’s parents were doing to her and helped Jenna achieve what she wanted despite her parents protests.  Lily alone understood the importance of communication and letting your children have their own space.  Because Jenna’s parents never let her communicate effectively with them even after her comma, she slowly broke away from the perfect Jenna, becoming the Jenna she wanted to become—a regular teenage girl.  When Lily listens, Jenna begins to see what she failed to see her entire life—pleasing other people does not bring peace. 

At her last ballet recital, Jenna releved instead of stomping and grinding.  However, with Lily’s help Jenna finally was able to overcome her parent’s expectations and obtain what she wanted.  She released Kara and Locke, and her own trapped mind because she wanted it.  “I need to own my life” (Pearson 254) is what she needed most of all.  She wanted to be a normal girl with the same chance of survival as everyone else.  When she realized this and destroyed her backup she found peace, she found strength, and she found the real Jenna. 

Works Cited

Pearson, Mary E. The Adoration of Jenna Fox. New York: Henry Holt and Company, LLC, 2008. Print.

For more information of Mary E. Pearson click here. 

*Please note that I know the word "releve' has an accent on the last "e". My computer will not let me put one there.  So just pretend there is one.