Sheltered

Sheltered people make compelling characters. If a character is sheltered from an original world, like muggle-raised Harry, readers get to see the world through someone who's just as new to it as they are. When a character is sheltered from our own world, ordinary things become exotic, wondrous, and scary.

I'm currently reading Palace of Lies, a brilliant novel about a sheltered character by Margaret Peterson Haddix. Princess Desmia is fourteen years old and she’s never seen the sky. Her entire life has been spent trapped inside a palace filled with scheming courtiers. This teaches her fear. Towards the beginning of the novel, her palace is burned down by unknown saboteurs and she’s forced to flee the city. Her first glimpse of the raw blue sky, unhemmed by  buildings, sends her into hysterics and she screams uncontrollably. Her traveling companions resort to carrying her on a stretcher with a sheet over her head to keep her quiet. 

At the start, Desmia’s only characteristics are her shelteredness and paranoia, though of course she grows as the story progresses. You’d think that would make her hard to like, but it doesn’t, because she featured as a non-POV character in Palace if Mirrors, a companion book to Palace of Lies. We already know this girl and now we get to see things from inside her head. I was impressed with the author for taking shelteredness to such a realistic extreme. Margaret Peterson Haddix has also written Claim to Fame, a book about a girl who hears gossip about herself in her head whenever she steps out of her house, and the Shadow Children Sequence, a series about kids who are raised in hiding because they were born illegally under population control laws. This is my favorite of her takes on sheltered kids.

Showing shelteredness in characterization is hard to pull of, but you should at least acknowledge it in dialogue. I’ve read a few books where young girls were raised only by women-either Rapunzel style where they only know a mother, or Wonder Woman style where they grow up surrounded by other women. And yet when these girls first meet a man, they have no trouble using male pronouns. Sure, they might have heard he/him/his words in conversation with other women, but that doesn’t mean they’ll be able to use them flawlessly. You know what the word “whom” means but don’t get much practice using it. If you found yourself transported into a society where whom was common usage, you’d stumble through conversations and need to adjust to using it. 

I once read a Rapunzel-style isolation story where a teenage girl doesn’t know what sex is because she’s never met a man and her mother never needed to explain it to her. Yet she can use the word “whorehouse” in a sentence in a way that implies she has a vague notion of what a whorehouse is. Sex seems to be a favorite element authors like using when showing the effects of sheltering on a character, though I think it's less interesting than the linguistic side of things.

Being sheltered stunts your entire vocabulary. Sarah Miller’s nonfiction book The Miracle and Tragedy of the Dionne Quintuplets tells the story of five sisters who were raised in public isolation for nine years. The Canadian government seized them from their parents, built a nursery with one-way mirrors for tourists to gawk at them, and left them in the care of doctors and nurses until they were nine years old. Because their nursery operated on a strict schedule, they didn't need to ask for things. Everything was given to them at predictable times. They didn't get to meet new people and identical sisters raised together have a natural understanding of each other, so there wasn't much need to talk at all. At one point, they only knew about 75 words when average toddlers know a few hundred.

Basic social skills will be affected, too. Patricia Kindl's The Woman in the Wall gives us Anna, a girl who lives secretly in the walls of her family's huge house. When she steps out of the wall to talk to someone, her first spoken words in years are hoarse because she's forgotten that you need to inhale before speaking. 

Everybody lives sheltered to some extent, or at least lacking in knowledge. I knew a girl who had never used a vending machine at age nineteen. I didn't learn the word for tupperware until I was about twelve because I heard them called "plastic containers." Sheltering either leads to a lack of confidence, when people realize they're missing something, or a bumbling display of overconfidence when people want to disguise the fact they don't or they've never realized the lack in the first place. Again, sex seems to be a fascination for people writing sheltered characters. At my first bachelorette party, a girl who thought she'd learned a lot about sex and sexualities from the University of Tumblr made statements she thought helped her sound woke-"I wonder what asexual people do at bachelorette parties"-but she didn't know a basic female body term when I used it in a sentence. 

On the under-confidence side, I grew up with a mom who didn't let us play with face cards, so I still have trouble keeping track of what order the non-number cards go in and I get the clubs and clovers mixed up. In my teens, there were opportunities to play card games with friends, but I remember standing off to the side sipping sodas at one party because I didn't want to lose in front of everyone. My parents invited my brother and me to play cards with them this week and they learned that neither my brother or I could shuffle a deck.

Equally as important to your characterization is what they're sheltered with, not just what they're sheltered from. The Dionne sisters were raised with an iron-clad sister bond, Princess Desmia with political paranoia, woman-raised Rapunzels and Wonder Womans with a ubiquitous feminine presence. All those things will inform their perception of the outside world they grow to know.