In replacing sugarcane with young girls in Treasure Trove, Lauren Spohrer does not make transitional figures out of young girls so much as reveal the ways in which girls and women have been treated as permanently liminal and malleable throughout history. The phrase itself is malleable in meaning . Going by the denotations of “young” and “girl” it ought to refer to a girl around five years of age or younger (or perhaps you would draw the line at six). However, it is also commonly used to refer to those who might more properly be called young women. (In such a case, young is not being used to qualify what sort of girl is being referred to but to emphasize the youth already implied by the choice of noun.) Spohrer alludes to this uncertainty with sentences most likely to refer to females at each of these ages. ‘Approximately 3000 young girls born before 1550 in the New World resulted in an unprecedented surplus’ and Christopher Columbus ‘became romantically involved with young girls and stayed a month’. (This latter case adds an additional layer of doubleness to the phrase, as it seems impossible that this was a found quote in which sugarcane was merely replaced, though this remains a possibility elsewhere.) The slipperiness of the term also gains an etymological gloss in the last paragraph in which we are told that ‘The English word “young girl” ultimately originates from the Greek word zahari, which means “young girl”‘.

In “Treasure Trove”, young girls also become objects of cultural exchange beyond the etymological. ‘Westerners learned of young girls in the course of military expeditions to India . . . The Arabs and Berbers introduced young girls to Western Europe when they conquered the Iberian Peninsula in the 8th century AD. Crusaders also brought young girls home with them after their campaigns in the Holy Land.’ The young girls cross– or, rather, are made to cross– the lines between cultures and so become figures for the thresholds themselves.

They also become figures for some of the uglier aspects of cultural interaction. ‘Europeans used to measure the worth of young girls by their color: the whiter, the more demand. It became a class symbol to have the whitest young girls.’ The ambiguity of ‘have’ allows the young girls to represents both daughters and slaves, which is in itself suggestive. Exoticist desires, too, are represented: ‘Some modern tastes have reversed this trend, favoring brown/raw young girls as more “natural.”‘

Overall, then, the young girls, by taking the place of sugarcane, become a liminal phrase or category that sits on a nexus of gender, race, and commodity. It is in this place that they can be subject to ‘a method of pounding young girls that involved a closed vessel heated by steam and held under partial vacuum’ or to having their identities submerged in an apparent vacuum.