Notes on Dr. Maria Tatar's Lecture: “A 'Damn Mob' of Scribbling Girls”

    As someone encountering Dr. Maria Tatar’s work for the first time during this event, I was not disappointed! Dr. Tatar is a research professor at Harvard University and specializes in children’s literature, modern German culture, and folklore. Her research includes authors like the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen, childhood reading and cultural studies, and folklore and mythology. Her most recent work, The Heroine with 1001 Faces, takes on the staggering yet hidden history of heroines, challenging the male-centric models of heroism in Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces. In this latest publication, Dr. Tatar flips the script on what it means to be a “curious” young woman, emphasizing how these girls depart from the canon through their compassion and craft. Her interests culminated in the event titled “A ‘Damn Mob’ of Scribbling Girls: From Jo March to Starr Carter,” which explored girls from popular media and literature who find agency within domestic spaces and enact their power, not only to survive, but to care for others. 

Dr. Tatar began her lecture with images of warrior women – cinematic women who are dramatically armed and ready for battle. She highlights their strength that both ornaments and sustains their femininity. Whether glittering in golden armor or fitted in a flowing red dress while riding in a chariot, these young women embody a feminine power that defies the traditional domestic spaces they find themselves in. In this opening, Dr. Tatar introduces her argument: these girls, trained to accommodate themselves in a society of gendered propriety, rebel against dominant power structures through their craft. 

The first literary work Dr. Tatar introduces is Louisa May Alcott’s beloved novel Little Women. However, she invokes the character Jo March through the film directed by Greta Gerwig (2019) instead of the novel. While Alcott captures all the dimensions of the domestic, the acts meant to make a home comfortable, Gerwig’s Jo March exuberantly displays how reading, writing, and acting are radical acts of rebellion. This emphasis on a young woman’s reach for autonomy allowed Dr. Tatar to identify the potential for heroism within domesticity. She identifies writing as a craft that provides an opportunity for heroism, an action that involves both curiosity and care. Tatar defines craft as cunning design, work that has been carried out in multiple modalities such as knitting, weaving, storytelling, or simply talking. 

In both the novel and the film, the heroes of the story are the fathers heading off to war while the women maintain the home space. Dr. Tatar urges us to ask: Who are our heroes? Our heroines? She grafts onto her argument the concept of the hero from Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces to assert that women are not the ones receiving the call to action. If anything, this persistence of men at the forefront of heroism has become the Hollywood narrative playbook. It becomes an easy correlation to see men returning from war as a literalized hero’s journey. However, Dr. Tatar reminds us that the return in the hero’s journey is always about healing. Here, in curious and caring spaces, is where women can no longer be silenced. 

The lecture took a poignant turn when Dr. Tatar connected her ideas with the COVID-19 lockdowns we have collectively experienced in the past two years. In lockdown, she notes, we were looking for heroes. We found them in our community caretakers, like doctors and nurses, childcare workers, and educators. More than anything, though, we encountered silence. Like the image of Philomena weaving her tapestry, the concept of heroism faces a cultural reboot during the COVID-19 pandemic. The investment in healing and care work, fields predominantly held by women, found a refreshed prioritization and attention from the public. Dr. Tatar turns to Carlos Fuentes and restates, “Writing is a struggle against silence.” Here, she draws a comparison to the strategy of silenced women. As mentioned before, craft becomes the strategy to find a voice. Through texts and textiles, women speak truth to power. 

One of the tenets of her work, curiosity, is seen as the cardinal sin of women while care is delegitimized on the basis of gender oppressive attitudes. Dr. Tatar moves from writing as a form of discovering identity and self actualization to a desire for immortality. This curiosity thus becomes a commitment to causes these young women are passionate about, concretizing their thoughts and ideas in written word. The literary text Dr. Tatar closes her lecture with is Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give. Through the protagonist, Starr Carter, Dr. Tatar realizes that self-actualization and a commitment to social causes are not mutually exclusive. From Anne of Green Gables to Matilda, Anne Frank to Harriet the Spy, the craft of writing becomes a mode of achieving an encounter with an empowered self, a political act that speaks truth to power. 

    I was very intrigued by Dr. Tatar’s inspirations for this work. One of the most compelling was Scheherazade, a major female character from One Thousand and One Nights who is also a scholar and reader. She is a storyteller, and known as a master of cliffhangers, who understands the seductive power of stories. Dr. Tatar also emphasizes that she is a survivor, ensuring that others will be saved and protected from the antagonist of her story. She also invokes the classic tales of Pandora and Eve, two young women whose bodies are sexualized and whose curiosity is read as carnal rather than intellectual. Through these figures, she calls on us to consider replacing empathy with curiosity, craft, and care. Rather than universalizing our characters or their experiences, Dr. Tatar invites us to raise critical awareness about the codes of gender that inform power in these texts and, ultimately, the way we perceive “domestic” activities as passive. As she states in the lecture, “readers often seek their mirrors in books.” Through the close reading Tatar promotes, we achieve tools for learning how to navigate our real world relationships via the representations we find in these stories and move with the mob of scribbling women. 

    Readers and writers in the audience also asked some very intriguing questions about Dr. Tatar’s work. Some listeners asked about the labor of our bodies, the work of our hands, and how to reconcile this with the public arena. Dr. Tatar invited us to compare Jo March with Starr Carter, and the modes they used to share their voices. While Jo March hand-wrote her thoughts, Starr Carter takes on a megaphone and a computer keyboard as powerful instruments for securing justice. Other listeners discussed what it means to “give up” one’s femininity in exchange for strength, or if femininity can be perceived as strength itself. Dr. Tatar invokes examples from modern film and media, like Katniss Everdeen of The Hunger Games (dir. Gary Ross) or Snow White from Snow White and the Huntsmen (dir. Rupert Sanders) – both of these young women display strength while also being connected to poetry, song, and art. A few others brought up the question of rethinking passivity from past to present. We’re invited to look more deeply into domestic actions while understanding the circumstances of women like Jo March as narrow. Dr. Tatar inspired me to use that historical past to reimagine curiosity, craft, and care in today’s world. This reimagining allows us to reconstruct our imaging of girlhood while understanding our own writing as heroic.

DN

I am Me: An Unlikely Princess Against the Spectacle

Recently (say within the last 30 or so years), fairytales have been getting criticized left and right and from all sides. Feminists scholars, bloggers, and even vloggers, have left no shell unturned, no coral unexplored, when it comes to critiquing the popular folktales from the perspective of modern feminism. These stories have shaped many a young girl’s romantic expectations, with their portrayals of adolescent waiting and dreaming, romanticizations of marriage, bondage to the father before their prince comes along, and, probably the most referenced and criticized aspect of fairytales, the princess’ reliance on external rescue.

There’s no surprise, then, that fairy tale retellings are popular among children and young adult authors and this popularity exposes a complicated ideology many feminist would say needs to be reevaluated among modern fairy tales. I’d attribute this popularity, in part, to one of the most successful novels to come from this genre: Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine. Up until now, I haven’t found a fairy tale retelling that could possibly compete with it because, let’s face it, that’s a pretty high bar to set — unless you count the Shrek movies. However, buying a copy of Soman Chainani’s The School for Good and Evil from Powell’s Books in Portland was the best decision I ever made in 2015.

The book begins with best friends, Sophie and Agatha, who have very different reactions to being kidnapped and whisked away to the fabled School for Good and Evil. Self-proclaimed “most beautiful girl” in their town of Gavaldon, Sophie has dreamed of this day for a long time—she’s going to earn her high marks at the School for Good and become a full-fledged princess, just as she believes she deserves. But fortune’s not quite so clear-cut and command-able as that. Sophie, with her giant pink dress and long, golden hair, is dropped onto Evil Shore, while Agatha ends up on the other side in Good, and the two must live through the fairy tale in order to get out of it.

The School for Good and Evil is filled with everything that you’d want out of a fairy tale retelling and so much more. It’ll even please fans of the Harry Potter series, with its talk of houses and common rooms and class schedules like Beautification and History of Villainy. There are princes and princesses, good is pitted against evil in classic fairy tale fashion, and it first seems like lines are very cut and clean with princesses still waiting for their prince to rescue them. And suddenly you think, “Wait. This is actually a major problem, right?” And you’d be correct.

There is a great deal at stake in what is geared toward young audiences, and subconsciously, children, especially young girls, can transfer into their lives cultural norms that do nothing but exalt passivity, dependency, and self-sacrifice as a female’s cardinal virtues.

So underneath the complex plot, the snark and the witty hilarious moments in this novel express the heteronormativity common in fairy tales, dragging it into the light and exposing its ugliness, especially when it comes to the “Good Side” of the school, which turns out to be only a hollow, superficial beauty. Read through the lens of Guy Debord’s “Society of the Spectacle,” the students of this school are all focused on regurgitating the school’s idea of who they should be, which Chainani positions as the spectacle.

The author draws a parallel between the authority figures of the school and the numerous adults who inhabit a young person’s life. Parents teach their children the values they hold important, as their own parents did for them, but what else is subtly coded in those values that more-often-than-not are asking children to conform themselves to a certain standard? When Chainani acknowledges this disjunction in Sophie’s definition of beauty and virtue, he is setting up that where we are going as a society is- The School for Good and Evil. The school resembles a society that is dominated by the spectacle, which simultaneously boxes up young people in a false binary based on superficial characteristics, like beauty and gender stereotypes, because it will maintain the heteronormative status quo—boys will be princes and girls will be princesses, but there are repercussions for students failing. And that is where this novel turns dark and eerie. Agatha realizes this before Sophie does, as she stumbles upon the Gallery of Good and “taxidermied creatures loom[ing] over her, stuffed and mounted on rosy pink walls. She dusted off their plaques to find the booted Master Cat, Cinderella’s favorite rat, Jack’s sold-off cow, stamped with the names of children who weren’t good enough to be heroes or sidekicks or servants” and when she catches sight of the beanstalk: “HOLDEN OF RAINBOW GALE. That wretched plant had once been a boy.” The mentality of sexism and homogenization is dramatized into this literal process of objectification. Like Debord says of the nature of the spectacle, it has to erase identity in order to continue on with its exploitation of the spectator (the individual).

While readers typically wave away the supernatural elements in fantasy novels, what is left is ultimately the reality within the spectacle: that what is at stake is individual identity and agency within identity in order for Sophie, Agatha, and others to be themselves. One example of this is Sophie’s mindless readiness to embody the ideology—being the princess—at any cost, even at the dissolution of her individual identity and her friendship with Agatha, though she is the one trying to get them home, which seems ridiculous, but when mirrored with our social reality, the idea is not so farfetched from the lengths young people go to fit media standards. By exaggerating the spectacle, which is an authorial force, to make it out to be ridiculous to the reader, it destabilizes its power, and makes it perhaps a little easier to think critically about and resist the spectacle.

Moreover, Agatha is one of the most fleshed-out characters I have encountered in a young adult novel in a while, and is what makes her the ideal candidate for critical resistance to the status quo at the school is her ability to have sensitivity and empathy for other people, not just for herself. She embodies the critical discourse, asking the question about whether there is the possibility of resistance. Agatha is emotionally and intellectually equipped to see the propaganda put forth by The School for Good and Evil for what is—an exposition of all that is wrong with what society teaches us to take at face value. Her greatest power, what makes her a true princess among the other girls is her power to grant wishes, and this is no more personified than in the class for Communication with Animals. In trying to communicate her wish to a magical fish (as all animals serve princesses), the process goes awry:

“The fish swelled into a ballooning black mass, creeping up her hand [. . . ] and sucked her deeper like a gelatinous grave, stifling her last breaths, leeching her every last drop of life until there was nothing left to—
 Give.
 Agatha fell back in shock.
 In her arms was a girl. No more than twelve or thirteen, with toffee skin and a tangle of dark curls. She stirred, opened her eyes, and smiled at Agatha as if she were an old friend. ‘A hundred years, and you were the first who wished to free me.’”

Soman Chainani empowers young readers to reach out as Agatha has with a power that is inherently within them but is stifled away by the dominant culture. And maybe readers will go into other books with the same eye for how those novels contribute or try to resist dominant ideologies.  

Multicultural Perspectives: Burka Avenger versus Disney

For the latter half of summer, I heard a lot of talk and saw many a screen shot of an emerging star in Pakistan's children's media field: The Burka Avenger. Skipping over the fact that the burka is not a cultural norm in Pakistan (read some insights about that here), this female super hero cartoon topples many of the preconceived notions of heroism and strength by using educational tools--books, pens etc--as her weapon of choice. And the Avenger's day job? A school teacher. One who does not wear a burka, by the way.

What the creators are trying to accomplish is clearly evident: the importance of female education, the power that an individual voice (and superb ninja training abilities) can have, a demonstration of female and child empowerment in general, and a visual challenge to those who would strive for otherwise. Does equating her attire with superhero skills glamorize the potentially limiting uses of the burka? It can, yes, but not necessarily. And what I enjoyed about the cartoon is how the teacher chooses to use it specifically for her own advantage, an important lesson in cultural awareness (that these are choices at all).

The cartoon feeds into the international dialog on Girl's agency too. Last week I shared a link about the merits of paranormal YA, which addressed the explosion of girl-centric YA adventures, dystopias, and science fiction and gave merit to the boom of YA romances. In it, the author did conclude that while a lot of movement has been made, there is still much left to be altered. I couple this with Sophia McDougall's "I Hate Strong Female Characters" to shed light on the fact that young women are prone to be classified as strong but little else. The diversity of their personal character is as sparse as the diversity of their culture. McDougall basically suggests that the sudden explosion of female-protagonist YA has gilded the post-apocalyptic road to serenity with girls whose primary struggle is with troubled romance, apart from having to save the world. Not enough room for character depth.

Of course, there are arguments challenging this. Do I think all female protagonists fall under those clutches? No, and they surely don't need to either. Some would say it isn't a forgone conclusion, and it is important to note that the McDougall focuses on films and television rather than literature. It is quite fair to say, I think, that books allow for more subversive actions, upending of cultural "norms"; they yield a greater amount of charisma for females. Movie adaptations tend to succumb to the aesthetic of visual appeal, and sacrifice story for pretty faces.

Still, even within books, there's a debate about the efficacy of girls' agency. All the more reason that I was impressed with the concepts supporting The Burka Avenger. It is trying quite fervently to place itself as a bearer of empowering thought. It stumbles and suffers from a collection of stereotypes itself, but nothing that impedes the feminine or child's voice. And, as the Huffington Post points out, it teaches Disney six invaluable lessons about heroines.

Environmental Crisis in Young Adult Fiction

A few weeks ago we shared a CFP for the upcoming Graduate Student Conference at Harvard, Sensing Wonder, Serious Play: Ecology and Children's Literature. The deadline for their submissions is August 15, so you have some time if you're interested in it.

If, like myself, you are intrigued by the concept but largely unfamiliar with the study of eco-criticism, maybe the following book will help. Environmental Crisis in Young Adult Fiction, by Alice Curry, addresses feminism and the environment in YA literature (particularly post-apocalyptic lit, which we all know there's no shortage of these days).

  ...it explores the narrative techniques by which contemporary young adult authors attempt to develop a sustainable ethic of care that can encompass ‘feminised’ peoples and spatialities, including nonhumans and the environment. With particular reference to the ways in which global processes are mapped onto the local landscape, it advocates a poetics of earth to replace the disengaged planetary consciousness often engendered through crisis. (from the publisher's description)

My current research involves examining space and geography in children's literature, so certain keywords of this description stand out to me. If someone has read this book or intends to in the near (or distant) future, I'd love some feedback. For now, Palgrave Macmillan has a discount code for 50% the text: WECYAF2013a (entered at checkout).