It was all too easy to be taboo in the 1940s. In class, Samantha mentioned Daly’s original idea to include an abortion in her novel. This would have been nearly impossible, however, because of the 1940s staunch opposition to abortion. Opposition was so staunch, in fact, that even writing about abortion was not only taboo, but also illegal [1]. While the abortion subplot never found its way into the final publication of Seventeenth Summer, perhaps a sex scene did finagle its way into the novel. Most “young adult” readers will immediately wonder, “But where?”
Of course, since Daly had to keep everything in her novel at a G-Rated level, the sex scene in Seventeenth Summer is hidden, steeped in metaphor. (For all those contemplating reading Seventeenth Summer to discover a juicy but hidden sex scene: it’s, pun-intended, pretty anticlimactic). While reading the “August” chapter of the novel, my eyes were peeled for any hint of a sex scene; each new paragraph started a new hope for the scene. Finally! I thought I had found the scene. Much to my surprise, however, the general class consensus on the sex scene was an entirely different scene than the one I had been thinking of as the sex scene.
In the pages preceding 280, Angie and Jack go out with Swede and Dollie. Suddenly on their ride, Angie requests they stop and that she and Jack go out into the field beyond the road to see the moon. According to Angie, Jack knows why she wanted to go out into the field, breaking into a run that Angie follows. When they finally reached their destination in the field Angie “was still panting from running and laughing at the same time, a delicious feeling” (280). From her panting and laughing (and delicious feeling) I gleamed this may be the moment after which Jack and Angie had finally taken their relationship to the “next level.” Angie even calls attention to wild raspberry bushes near them, paralleling the feeling of Jack’s lips the first time they kissed.
In class, however, I seemed to be out of the loop, for everyone else agreed that the sex scene was the scene in which Jack and Angie picked wild grapes! While of course it is possible the there were two sex scenes (gasp), I’m still putting my money on the raspberries, not the grapes.
[1] TIME published a fairly informative article entitled “The Long, Strange History of Birth Control” on, well, the history of birth control (both the use of birth control and the prohibition of spreading information about birth control). You can find it here: http://time.com/3692001/birth-control-history-djerassi/
Reading Young Adult Literature 
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