Boy Books and Girl Books

This month I remember my past, and look at my son's future...

When I was in the tenth grade our English class took on "coming of age" novels. We read The Catcher in the Rye, A Separate Peace, and (one of my favorite, though still under-read, boarding school novels) Good Times/Bad Times. All three are set in single-sex boys' boarding schools, and there are few women or girls in them. My (male) teacher, I remember, told us we should be able to "identify" with these characters because they were teenagers like us.

Did I mention that this was an all-girl class? Did I even notice, at the time, that we had read not one novel about a girl?

This column may not actually go in the direction you expect it...let me know what you think!

Daring

(cross-posted at Midlife Mama)

Today is the birthday of Astrid Lindgren, creator of one of the most daring girls in children' s literature, Pippi Longstocking. So it seems a fitting day to be talking about the new Daring Book for Girls, by Andi Buchanan and Miriam Peskowitz. (Full disclosure: I worked with Andi on Literary Mama, and, after reviewing Miriam's book for LM, have corresponded with her as well.)

My copy of The Daring Book arrived a couple of weeks ago and I put it on top of a stack of things to take care of later, as I (far too often) do. Nick (10) saw it first. "The Darling Book for Girls?" he asked. Then he corrected himself, but I thought the misreading was telling. Does he think girls are darling rather than daring? (Um, in a word--no. Not yet, anyway.)

He started flipping through it, immediately seeing the similarities to The Dangerous Book for Boys, which he received as a birthday present this year. "Hey! We didn't get instructions for how to make a volcano! Why didn't we get that?" He continued to turn pages, noting how many things "they" got to do that "we" didn't. "And why does it say 'no boys allowed' on the back? Mine doesn't say 'no girls allowed'!" He's not really one to be put off by prohibitions like that, but I was intrigued by his response. He found stuff he liked, and he didn't like being told it wasn't for him.

But then it got buried in the stack for a while and by the time I pulled it out again he was engrossed in a science project and didn't have time to check it out for a full review. So I handed it to Mariah (17) instead. She started by getting annoyed with the book. Too many games and jump-rope rhymes. "A lot of this is stuff that people think kids don't know but they do. Like, 'how to have a sleepout"?" So, it's a bit on the--perhaps unnecessarily--nostalgic side. But once she got past the games, she found a lot more to like: interesting stories about real princesses, crafts (she wants to go back and do some of those), Spanish and French vocabulary, Greek and Latin root words, more stories about interesting women..."Did you know Julia Child was a spy?" This is the kind of stuff she loves. She was a bit annoyed by the science sections--not because she doesn't like science, but because she does: "this seems like they thought, 'oh, girls don't like science, so we should put it in,' but they didn't even make it interesting! I think the periodic table of the elements is incredibly cool, but they made it boring!" So, on balance, she found things she likes and would go back to, but found the whole package a bit condescending. Well, she's 17--everything seems condescending to her. (Including, no doubt, that sentence. Sigh.)

So now both kids have had a crack at it, but I haven't even turned a page! Now, I'm a sucker for narrative, so what I go for are the stories: queens of the ancient world, unlikely spies, explorers (alas, I'm still waiting for the fascinating Isabella Bird to turn up in a book for kids...). These are all nicely done: short, readable, and intriguing.

Like Mariah, I am less fascinated by the handclap games and the jump-rope rhymes; those things really are still passed down on the playgrounds in my neighborhood, and one of the great pleasures of them is learning them from other kids, not from adults. But they take up a small enough section of the book. The page (!) on boys is blessedly sensible, and seems to take on the comparable section in the "Boys" book quite directly: while the "Boys" book starts with the premise that girls are different (because, apparently, they "do not get quite as excited by the use of urine as a secret ink as boys do"), the "Girls" book reminds girls that the generalizations they know about girls tend not to hold up, so the ones about boys are likely equally suspect. Nice work on that one, women.

Of course therein lies the essential paradox of this book: it exists only to demonstrate that it doesn't need to, trying to send the message that there's no reason girls and boys couldn't be equally daring and dangerous. I'm happy to read the message, and to shelve both books next to each other for both my kids to consult. And maybe, just maybe, we can look forward to a second, combined edition that dispenses with the particularity altogether.

surfeit

For reasons that are becoming less and less clear even to me, I've spent the last two days reading a series of pink-covered novels that goes on and on. I had read the first three some years ago for a talk, and am now expanding that talk into an article about how fairy tale motifs and inventive narrative strategies can be an empowering combination in YA literature for girls.

Really. The Princess Diaries. Empowering.

Well, in my defense, I thought so at the time. The first PD book gives us a smart and snarky narrator--ok, she's failing algebra, but she is still pretty smart--with an even smarter and snarkier best friend. She resists transformation into a princess, making it obvious to her girl-readers that such a transformation is a painful and often humiliating process. Her first-person narrative exposes what the omniscient and detached third person narrative of most fairy tales obscures: what the heroine herself thinks about the transformation. And getting to be pretty is just, well, not pretty, in this book.

It was a good talk.

So then I read Speak and Weetzie Bat and decided that similar things were going on in all three of them. The narrative voice is different in WB, and the overt references to fairy tales go under cover in Speak, but in all three a detailed (perhaps obsessive) focus on the trials of female adolescence makes manifest the issues that fairy tales seem to ignore: the pain, the humiliation, and the seeming never-endingness of it all.

However.

I do have to say that the now eight-plus* volumes of the PD weaken my case a bit. Oh, I can really expand on that whole never-ending thing--not one of these novels manages a real "happily-ever-after," after all, and the PD series, by going on and on (and on! She's not even finished her sophomore year yet!) does underscore that point nicely. But the pink covers** and, even more, the annoyingly Bridget-Jones-ish lack of self-confidence and, I have to say, decreasing intelligence, of the main character are wearing on me.*** Melinda and Weetzie, in their novels, aren't rocket scientists, but they do take charge of certain aspects of their lives and move on. Mia, on the other hand, is stuck in the endlessness of the diary format. I really have begun to wish she'd lose her journal and start blogging or something, just to break things up. (And, maybe, to move things along a little faster? Because even the obsessive Mia would have a hard time blogging moment-by-moment, which is how she journals.)

I think there are still interesting things to say about the series. There's actually an amusing Shamela-ish-ness (yikes! her debased vocabulary is rubbing off!) to the moment-by-moment stuff, every now and then. And a funny self-referentiality, as when, in volume VI, she complains about the movie's lack of fidelity to her "true" story. And a clear recognition of the ways that pre-existing narratives form our interpretations of our own realities (the part in volume IV where she tries to take Jane Eyre as a model for her relationship with her boyfriend is a nice effort, though it's pretty weakly done).

But the pink covers are beginning to get to me, as is the fact that there is still one full novel and a couple of "half volumes" that I feel the need to read before I can write about this. Except, of course, for writing about it here, which is helping.

*There are now, I believe, eight volumes and three "half" volumes: the half-volumes seem to detail only about a week or so apiece, whereas the volumes can cover ...well, actually volume seven only covers about a week, though the first few seem to cover a month or so each. The "half" volumes are shorter--about fifty pages--and cheaper.
**About those covers: I bought volumes II and III from Amazon.uk a few years back, when I was writing the talk, because they were already in pbk in the UK and even with the shipping charges it turned out to be cheaper to buy those than the US hardcovers. And they are not pink! The titles are different, too, but they are quite clearly the same books. I'm curious as to why they aren't pink in the UK, though not enough to research the issue too deeply.
***The first Bridget Jones delighted me: the whole Pride and Prejudice rewriting, the obsessive detailing of minutiae, all of it. But she's such a dope in Edge of Reason I could barely stand to read it. Anne Elliott is no idiot, but Bridget... I don't know if I can bring myself to read the third one, though I could, maybe, be convinced.

Writing yourself into the story

I have really never once since leaving the fifth grade wanted to be back there. Not that fifth grade was bad--in fact, I had a fabulous teacher who had colored contact lenses to match her outfits (this in 1971), and I thought she was great. It was a whole lot better than sixth grade, now that I think about it. Still, I was one of those kids who wants to grow up, the sooner the better, and I've rarely if ever had the nostalgic impulse to return to an earlier stage of me.

But if I were to be in fifth grade again, I'd want to be in Lelac Almagor's class at the National Cathedral School for girls in DC, if only to do this exercise. What a great story!

boy and girl books

One of the great pleasures of teaching children's literature is introducing "girl books" to male students. Invariably there is a surprised pleasure in their response to a book like, say, The Secret Garden, when they find out that it speaks to them just as much as, say, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

It's possible that The Secret Garden is a bad example here. After all there are plenty of significant male characters in it; in fact, a common complaint of feminist literary critics is that Burnett gives up Mary's story for Colin's halfway through. Although this is accurate--you can see it in the chapter headings, in fact, when Mary's pleading "Might I Have a Bit of Earth?" gives way to "I Am Colin"--it never felt that way to me as a child reading the novel. Indeed I continued to give Mary pride of place, even when the novel didn't, by recognizing that she engineers Colin's recovery, his new importance in the novel. She never goes away, she just has to share. It's not all about the protagonist, of course: plot lines (romance vs. adventure, "relationship" vs. "action") are usually trotted out as part of the explanation for how books get gendered as well. But if we read novels to "experience other minds," then at some level all novels are relationship novels, and we should just give up on giving them to boys.


I am of course unpersuaded that there really are "boy" and "girl" books. Marketing strategies that put floral covers on some books and monsters on others would suggest otherwise, but if you get beyond the covers, both books I just linked to have both male and female protagonists, and seem as if they could appeal equally to readers of both sexes. Let's not even get into the heterosexist assumptions behind some of this marketing...though I might for the record note that it's the book with the monster cover that seems to me to be suggesting a romance-plot-outcome (Nick and I haven't finished it yet, so I can't be certain).

The thing is, of course, a well-told story should appeal to any reader, and the canard that boys won't read girl books does the boys, above all, a disservice. Girls will read boy books (I could get into a long digression here about feminist standpoint theory, and may do so another day, but for the moment it's enough to say that, take my word for it, girls will read boy books--sometimes because they have to, sometimes because they can), but boys are often dissuaded from reading girl books, and it's too bad.

One year Mark claimed that Little Women and A Little Princess were the two best movies he'd seen all year (one in a second-run theatre; I know they didn't come out in the same year). Both stories were a complete revelation to him; both films told them well (again, we can debate their merits as adaptations another day--they worked for us); and I felt sorry that he'd gone so long without knowing them. But I have to acknowledge that Nick has so far evinced little interest in either, and I haven't yet pushed to read them to him. So what am I waiting for? He did give up on the Little House books (despite having heard one of them read aloud in class) with me, so maybe I just stopped trying at that point. And, while I'm at it, do parents of girls read "boy books" to them? There are very few books I've read to Nick that I didn't at some point read to Mariah (except the Bartimaeus trilogy and a few others that just weren't available when she was small), so for myself I think the answer is "yes," but I'm probably not the best example. I won't read what I think of as "trash" to either of them, so I gave up after one book in the Warrior series with Nick just as I never read a Babysitters' Club book to Mariah. And I think it's the "trash" books and series (oh, another topic for another day!) that are the most deeply gendered, so maybe a commitment to literary quality can (almost) obviate this problem. But not entirely.

Ah, too many digressions, not enough time! I'll have to come back to this one.

Off-Duty Disney Princesses, the play

This post is from last February, but Roger Sutton just linked to it now...here's a taste, but click the first link for the whole thing.

Snow White: Did you know Gaston was in rehab a few months ago? Sex addiction. But apparently he beat it.

Cinderella: What about the steroids?

Snow White: I hear he kicked those too. One of the busty blonde French serving wenches was in here the other day. She said he’s doing great—yoga, macrobiotic diet, a lot of charity work for Disney Characters Without Mothers. He’s a new man.

Cinderella: I admire that. I really do. (pause) Do you think they’re online? That organization you mentioned—

We missed the worst of the "Disney Princess" madness, thankfully--Mariah had to make do with the pretty little pony/centaurs from the original Fantasia, much of the time--but this still had me laughing out loud.

The Princess Problem

[9/13: small edits to add some links]

I'm just back from a long class on George MacDonald's The Princess and the Goblin. What, you say, you didn't grow up on this? Or maybe you did, but you forgot it, because it was long-winded and prosy and had an intrusive narrator. Or you saw it at Barnes & Noble (or somewhere else) but wouldn't buy it because it came packaged with a necklace (which should have been a ring, but whatever...)

But I love it, and I can't fully explain why. I know one reason is that the version I read (which is not always the version you can buy in stores, but sometimes it is)* has not only an intrusive narrator but an interrupting child as well, who figures out the story (sort of) ahead of time. As when the narrator reports that the princess of the title has come to a room where a woman sits spinning, and the child interrupts, "Oh, I know this story! It's Sleeping Beauty!" (not an exact quotation; my book's in the office). I loved that kid when I read the book; I was that kid, or I wanted to be.

But I also loved the princess. My father told me princess stories at bedtime, usually involving impossible quests to be performed by suitors who were, almost always, unsuitable. (We can talk about that another time, as well as my memory that my sister got bunny stories when her turn came around...) So I loved princesses in general, but this one in particular was worth loving, or so I thought. She got to save the miner boy who thought he was saving her, for example, and she also got to take a bath in a bottomless tub with a starry ceiling above her, and to wear a fire opal ring. It all sounded good to me.

I didn't keep the princess stuff away from Mariah. No-Nym has a guest post up right now at Dr. B's that is anti-princess, and I get why one should be anti-princess, but I wasn't, and it's too late now. (Though for what it's worth Mariah is pretty anti-princess as a teenager, so we didn't fail too miserably.) In P&G, the narrator insists that a "true" princess is humble, egalitarian, and a worker. (She's also polite and truthful.) So she's not the entirely negative role model that one might think a princess would be. (Most "princesses" in 19th-century novels are in fact not royal, and are indeed quite good role models. But, yet again, I digress.) But that still leaves open the question of why she has to be a princess at all--in many ways, the novel would work if she weren't, but not in every way.

More problematic for me as adult reader is the fact that, like Mary in The Secret Garden (which I'm teaching next week), the Princess Irene of P&G just gives up her story part-way through, and it becomes the boy-hero's story instead of hers. I didn't really notice that as a child, and there are still ways that she's important, but not as important as I'd like her to be. That actually doesn't happen to Sara of A Little Princess (another "charming classic"!), but it's not as uncommon as you might think. And it may just be the lot of princesses.

My non-princess is waiting for me so I'll have to leave that hanging. What do you think about princesses?


*The Puffin edition I linked above is based on the first book publication, which cut out the interruptions. I hear that the "Charming Classics" edition, however, includes them--they are from the first publication, which was a serialization in Macmillan's.

just to get some content here

Why Hemingway Is Chick-Lit -- In These Times: "“When women stop reading, the novel will be dead,” declared Ian McEwan in the Guardian last year. The British novelist reached this rather dire conclusion after venturing into a nearby park in an attempt to give away free novels. The result?

Only one “sensitive male soul” took up his offer, while every woman he approached was “eager and grateful” to do the same."

Click the title above to read the whole article. The take-home message: women read to "experience other ‘minds in action’—which is another way of defining ‘empathy’." Or maybe the take-home message is, the novel is already dead, since men don't care about it. (Shades of the nineteenth century, when novel-reading was derided as an effeminate pastime, as Chaudhry points out.) Men, by the way, do read: they just read non-fiction, according to the article.

I want to think about this more, especially since when I teach children's literature women are (slightly) less likely than men to have an interest in fantasy, which most people think of as the polar opposite of non-fiction. Hmm.

(Yes, I posted this on my other blog a couple of weeks ago, but it's still interesting.)