Lit Review

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Meredith Sutphin 12/4/07 Children's Literature – Dr. Sturm Literature Review Paper True Heroines: Female Empowerment in Children's Fantasy Literature Fantasy books seem to be a unique genre; frequently, both children and young adults list fantasy books among their favorites, across grade-levels and gender lines. 41% of third- through fifth-graders listed fantasy books as their “most favorite” books in a 1997 study (Boraks, N., Hoffman, A., & Bauer, D.), while a 1998 study in New Zealand revealed that fantasy books were consistently listed in the top five favorite genres of both male and female students between the ages of thirteen and fifteen (Goodyear, C.). The popularity of fantasy books has been capitalized upon by Hollywood in recent years with new productions of popular titles, including Narnia, The Golden Compass, and the Harry Potter series, with children, pre-adolescents and young adults as their target audiences. Clearly, fantasy stories have an engaging quality for many young people in today's culture. And, significantly, fantasy has a dedicated following of females: a graph of genre preferences of children in grades four through six shows that almost 80% of females pick up fantasy books as their first choices in reading material (Todd, K., 1998). When girls open fantasy books, whom do they see to represent themselves in the worlds they discover, and, perhaps more importantly, what do the worlds and characters they encounter teach them about themselves? A look at the traditional stories that could be considered predecessors of modern fantasy literature shows that women in stories of the fantastical have come a long way. Fairy tales, one of the earliest forms of fantasy to which children are introduced often emphasize women's surface characteristics, even though many tales have women as their main characters; titles such as “Sleeping Beauty,” “Beauty and the Beast,” and “Snow White,” could be said to show girls that outer appearance is the characteristic for which memorable female characters are named. But children can understand

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the abstract nature of symbolism; a recorded classroom session analyzed by Charles Temple (1993) shows that second- and third- graders see beauty as more than a surface characteristic. The students who discussed a reading of “Beauty and the Beast” clearly articulated that they understood the main character's beauty as a symbol for her good, kind nature, while the stepsisters' ugliness represented their ugly personalities (p. 92). However, the goals that these female characters pursue are perhaps more telling of the limits of “traditional” stories. Susan Lehr (2001) summarizes the fate of many women in children's literature succinctly: “many traditional books for girls end up with girls turning into women, defined as leaving family and friends behind, abandoning assertive behaviors, staying indoors, giving up one's vocation, finding a man, and becoming his wife, which is . . . often historically accurate. This is also common of “traditional” female heroines in children's fantasy who give up their own sense of agency once they find their man” (p. 15). It seems obvious that a female main character does not an empowering heroine make, and the older body of fantasy literature does not seem to provide many good examples for readers who see this distinction. However, many of the newer pieces of fantasy literature for children and young adults provide models of heroines who are resilient, strong, self-determined, and independent. Some of the notable examples cited in articles are Cynthia Voigt's Kingdom series, Robin McKinley's The Hero and the Crown, and Tamora Pierce's Song of the Lioness quartet. The female characters in these books live lives that provide alternative visions of success for the girls who read about them. These books each show a heroine “rising above a system that keeps her down – triumphing over it, reversing expectations” in a way that can be understood as reactionary to the “traditional” fantasy books that came before (Tolmie, J., 2006, p. 147). Tamora Pierce (1993) herself focuses on the empowering nature of a convention of fantasy literature, the championing of an underdog, in her article “Fantasy: Why Kids Read It, Why Kids Need It.” She emphasizes the lure that underdog characters have for children:

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In the real world, kids have little say. This is a given; it is the nature of childhood. In fantasy, however short, fat, unbeautiful, weak, dreamy, or unlearned individuals may be, they find a realm in which those things are negated by strength. The catch--there is always a catch--is that empowerment brings trials. (p. 51) Two of Pierce's own heroines, Alanna and Kel, struggle to follow their dreams of becoming knights, a title rooted in one of the most patriarchal systems imaginable, both in the realms of history and fantasy. The challenges and hardships they face and overcome are difficulties with which modern girls can empathize through symbol, and though girls have begun to find equal places in classrooms and on sports fields, mentally seeing a story through another girl's eyes can be a reaffirming experience. Underdog heroines fit within the conventions of the genre in a way that opens up new avenues to engage girls in stories that encourage them to dream and reach for their own achievements. These examples of fantasy literature provide another voice for girls to hear, show them that finding Prince Charming does not have to be the ultimate goal of a woman's life, whether she lives in America or “a far-away land.” However, Alanna, Kel, and other heroines who struggle to overcome the limitations placed upon them raise questions about the dichotomy between the dreams the lady knights attain and the system of male power that remains affirmed by those dreams; as Jane Tolmie (2006) asks, “is this a message that overturns expectations about culture or paradoxically provides a backwards affirmation of an undesirable general condition?” (p. 151). This question of dichotomy applies to fantasy books set outside of historically oppressive times in women's history; the popularity of the Harry Potter books have led some feminist writers to critique J.K. Rowling for not giving women greater equality in her wizarding world (Thompson, D., 2001, p. 43). The character of Hermione Granger is a particular focus of critique; by contrasting Hermione's (somewhat slavish) dedication to her studies with Harry and Ron's easy-going approach to homework, Deborah Thompson points out that the boys do not have to

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try in order to pass their classes, but Hermione has to scramble to keep up her grades and is portrayed as a killjoy for doing so (p. 43). E.E. Heilman sees Hermione's position in the trio of main characters as a subordinate one: “Hermione is primarily an enabler of Harry's and Ron's adventures rather than an adventurer in her own right” (qtd. in Mayes-Elma, R., 2006, p. 9). Hermione, unlike Alanna, is not trying to enter a world belonging only to men; however, her presence as an empowering heroine is called into question by critics who see her as yet another female who tries to shine in a world which is set up to laud the efforts of men over those of women. Professor McGonagall, one of the other prominent females in the series, shares the trait of pride in intellect that characterizes Hermione. Ruthann Mayes-Elma explains in depth how their intelligence limits them in ways that men in Rowling's books are not limited, and insists that intelligence is not an empowering trait for women in the Harry Potter books: A rather insidious aspect of patriarchy is of course convincing the oppressed that they do indeed have some power and control and simultaneously restricting this power so as to prevent true equality . . . While Hermione and Professor McGonagall do enact their agency and become empowered through their intelligence, they still are not allowed to fully transcend male oppression or to critique their own oppression and the institutions that support it. Rather, they are granted “partial power that serves to support the oppressiveness of the patriarchal institutional system. (p. 93) For Mayes-Elma, Thompson, and Tolmie, truly empowering literature for girls must break free from traditional paradigms. Heroines can never be equal to heroes until they are no longer struggling against systems which do not impair their male counterparts in the same ways. There is still another trend in children's fantasy literature of books that do tell heroines' stories outside of patriarchal structures and worlds. Tolmie, writing about heroines in fantasy books set in medieval worlds, laments the limits in place in stories where women struggle for equality: “it seems the

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fantasy heroine must be content, for a while yet, to have patriarchy itself as her adventure” (p. 157). But some fantasy books for children break the molds that have, for so long, seemed to define fantasy literature. Dierdre Baker (2006) examines these fantasies from a unique angle: geography. Working from Dianne Wynne Jones' The Tough Guide to Fantasyland, a parody book describing the conventions of geography in fantasy literature, she examines the ways that popular books in the genre stay within the boxed-in, one-size-fits-all maps (complete with ominously named mountain ranges, squiggly-lined rivers, and inherent allegory) (p. 239). Books that break away from this tradition often offer refreshing female perspectives that are not simply those of women in men's worlds: ingenuity in geography and the treatment of gender seem, for Baker, to go hand in hand. In particular, she notes the works of Ursula LeGuin, Dianne Wynn Jones, and Terry Pratchett as examples of books that provide new worlds for girls, both geographically and ideologically. For some, the question of whether female fantasy characters must live outside of a patriarchal paradigm to be truly empowering for readers is answered simply by defining what it means to be a heroine. Both book characters and children must live in the worlds in which they are born; empowerment can be derived from the values that steer the female characters in their tales. T. A. Barron (2001) defines a heroine as a female who lives from her authentic inner self, and he advocates that this quality is what holds empowerment for girls: How can our young women possibly discover the heroes in themselves if they are continuously told that they are what they buy or wear or look like, rather than what they do and say and strive to become? How can they come to know how much their choices matter – indeed, how much they themselves matter – if they are constantly told that superficial qualities are more important than lasting ones? . . . A hero cares about ideas and goals and sacred qualities – not the color of her shoes or hair or car. (p. 31) In this understanding, the title of “heroine” is, in a way, taken from a usage in which it is a title under

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contention; a heroine does not have to be defined by the world in which she lives or the dreams she pursues. Instead, a heroine can be any female character who knows her own will and aligns her will with something good. This definition of a heroine may, perhaps, be the most empowering definition of all, for no matter what dreams girl readers have or what challenges they face, they, too, can be learn to be heroines by following the examples of characters who are true to themselves. Fantasy literature provides a continuum of role models for girls, from the Beauty of fairy tales who ends her story by settling down with her Beast-turned-Prince to Tiffany Aching of Terry Pratchett's Wee Free Men, who has her suspicions of the values promoted in The Goode Childe's Book of Fairie Tales (including the reasoning that “shoe size is a good way of choosing a wife”) (qtd. in Baker, D, 2006, p. 248). Perhaps it is this full spectrum of heroines that gives fantasy literature such power for girls rather than any one subtype of character or paradigm within the genre; perhaps the genre's empowering qualities are rooted in the myriad of possibilities found within.

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References Baker, D. F. (2006). What we found on our journey through fantasyland. Children's Literature in Education, 37(3), 237-251. Retrieved November 7, 2007, from Academic Search Premier (21937113). Barron, T. A. (2001). The unquenchable source: finding a heroic girl inside a man. In S. Lehr (Ed.), Beauty, brains, and brawn: the construction of gender in children's literature. (pp. 30-35). Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Boraks, N., Hoffman, A., and Bauer, D. (1997). Children's book preferences: patterns, particulars, and possible implications. Reading Psychology, 18, 309-41. (From class handout, 10/7/07) Goodyear, C. (1998). Popularity of various fiction book genres among high school students in Auckland. (From class handout, 10/7/07) Lehr, S. (2001). The hidden curriculum: are we teaching young girls to wait for the prince? In S. Lehr (Ed.), Beauty, brains, and brawn: the construction of gender in children's literature. (pp. 1-20.) Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Mayes-Elma, R. (2006). Females and Harry Potter: not all that empowering. New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. Pierce, T. (1993). Fantasy: why kids read it, why kids need it. School Library Journal, 39(10), 50-51. Retrieved November 7, 2007, from Academic Search Premier (9310127803). Temple, C. (1993). “What if Beauty had been Ugly?”: reading against the grain of gender bias in children's books. Language Arts, 70, 89-93. Thompson, D. (2001). Deconstructing Harry: casting a critical eye on the witches and wizards of Hogwarts. In S. Lehr (Ed.), Beauty, brains, and brawn: the construction of gender in children's literature. (pp. 42-55). Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

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Todd, K. (1998). Three researchers report on libraries and youth at ALA conference. Journal of Youth Services in Libraries, 2(1), 102-104. (From class handout, 11/27/07)