43 pages • 1 hour read
Emily M. DanforthThe Miseducation of Cameron Post
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2012A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Coming to Terms with Homosexuality
The Miseducation of Cameron Post deals with the social and political implications of sexual and gender identity. Cameron’s life embodies the argument around whether homosexual tendencies are natural or nurtured. For Cameron, her attraction to and romantic love for other women does not feel like something she can help or change. She is baffled when Lindsey lectures her on the political and revolutionary implications of lesbianism and queer identity: Cameron’s sexual preference has never felt like a choice.
However, Gates of Praise, Ruth’s radical Christian church, and God’s Promise, the school for homosexual teens, insist that homosexuality stems from formative trauma and family dysfunction. This implication that homosexual behavior can be unlearned or “fixed” informs Cameron’s nascent shame around her sexual desire in the wake of her parents’ death. After her parents die, Cameron pins their passing on her kissing Irene. Coley, the instigator of the affair she and Cameron later share, exemplifies the idea of homosexuality as a sickness: Coley relinquishes responsibility for her and Cameron’s relationship, declaring that Cameron manipulated her into conducting homosexual acts. The theme of sexual shame continues with Mark’s self-mutilation, positing the impossibility of changing sexual preference and pointing to the dangers of suppressing sexual identity. Cameron’s decision to escape God’s Promise and live her life on her own terms symbolizes her ultimate rejection of reductive or dogmatic understandings of sexuality. The backdrop of the Gay Rights Movement in the early 1990s accentuates this theme.
The Complexities of the Grieving Process
Cameron Post comes to terms with her parents’ unexpected passing throughout the novel. At the beginning of the book, 12-year-old Cameron masks her grief in humor or sedates her sadness with films. She secretly mocks the school’s mandatory grief sessions. Convinced that her kiss with Irene caused the crash, Cameron’s sense of responsibility around her parents’ death ties closely to her battle with homosexual shame. Cameron escapes her grief through watching films, which also serves as an outlet for her same-sex attraction. Ruth’s implication that sending Cameron to God’s Promise would have been what Ruth’s parents would have wanted only furthers this duality of grief and shame. Throughout the book, Cameron directs most of her anger towards Ruth.
Cameron struggles with the possibility that she may not have really known her parents or that her memories of them are inaccurate. This prompts a deep investigation of the connection between the Montana-Yellowstone earthquake that almost killed her mother at Quake Lake as a child and her mother’s later death at Quake Lake. In addition, Cameron develops an obsession with the dollhouse Cameron’s father built for her when she was 5. Both are tangible parts of the past that Cameron can either touch or constantly reference, giving her a warped sense of stability amidst the uncertain tides of grief.
Cameron eventually abandons these obsessions in favor of her own recollection of the past. When seeking closure around her parents’ death at Quake Lake after leaving God’s Promise behind, Cameron vows to remember them in a favorable light. She tells them she loves them. Cameron also apologizes to her parents for feeling a measure of relief that they would never find out about the kiss she and Irene shared, therefore relinquishing her homosexual shame while confronting her grief.
Navigating Faith and Religion
From the beginning of the book, Cameron contents with the belief systems of those around her. Ruth’s appearance in Cameron’s life brings with it an incorporation of extreme religious belief into Cameron’s day-to-day existence. Once Ruth becomes Cameron’s primary care giver, Cameron’s life becomes structured by faith. After Ruth encourages her to talk to God about her grief, Cameron wonders if destiny rules existence:
[M]aybe what all this meant was that there was no God, but instead only fate and the chain of events that is, for each of us, predetermined—and that maybe there was some lesson in my mom drowning at Quake Lake thirty years later (39).
While at God’s Promise, Cameron obsesses over Mark’s commitment to the God’s Promise teachings. Adam begins to suspect that her interest in Mark is romantic rather than anthropological, joking that the anti-homosexual God’s Promise methods are “working” on her. Towards the end of the book, Cameron studies Lydia’s use of psychology to validate the perspectives of God’s Promise.
The extremism of Ruth’s church, Gates of Praise, prompts Cameron to question her own ability to believe and define her spirituality. Although Cameron pledges her allegiance to destiny, she wonders if there might be some truth in the God’s Promise worldview. In the end, Cameron concludes that she is better positioned to question than to believe. She reacts to the stringent social rules of spaces such as Gates of Praise and God’s Promise by embracing a fully self-defined destiny.
