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

They are “liberated from history.”

If you didn’t get a chance to attend Dr. Michelle Abates talk on Wednesday, February 20^th at SDSU’s Love Library, then you missed a great talk on queer futurity and “queer retrosity.” Dr. Abate began her talk, “Out of History: Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, the 1980s, and the Reclamation of a Lost Past,” by first situating the novel in queer young adult genre and then in the history at the center of the plot.

The author tells us, “It was hard to be gay in the 80s. It wasn’t safe to be gay in the 80s.” Abate clarifies misconceptions about the AIDS crisis by underscoring America’s response to the many lives lost as the government failed to act. She notes that “AIDS was a pivotal social issue in 1987.” While politicians such as Pat Buchannan blamed the victims of this crisis with judgmental comments, “Those poor homosexuals—they have declared war upon nature, and now nature is exacting an awful retribution,”[1] organizations like ACT UP moved to educated America.

Abate notes that while the AIDS epidemic is a central part of the time in which Sáenz’s novel is set, to make it the focal point opens Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe up to what Sedgwick defines as a “paranoid reading.” Therefore, according to Abate, a reparative reading of Sáenz’s novel surprises us by imagining a more utopian past through what she calls “queer retrosity.” She goes on to say that the novel “upends our preconceptions” and therefore, Ari and Dante are “liberated from history.” 

(KT)

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[1] https://thinkprogress.org/flashback-buchanan-aids-is-natures-awful-retribution-against-homosexuality-2049a2734cfb/

San Diego State Celebrated the 200th Anniversary of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

On Halloween day, SDSU’s library celebrated the 200^th anniversary of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The event included tricks and treats: cake, candy, and a display of Frankenstein related works. The highlight of the celebration was a viewing of James Whale’s 1931 film adaptation of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus (1818), the world’s first science fiction text. Shelley was only twenty-one years-old when she published this iconic work according to the discussion led by SDSU librarian Linda Salem and Mary Galbraith, a children’s literature instructor in the university’s English department. They went on to explain that the author was the daughter of philosopher William Godwin and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft who died just days after Mary Shelley’s birth. The author’s tumultuous childhood which involved living with demanding foster parents, continued to be quite trying after she eloped at seventeen years old. According to Linda Salem, “Mary Shelley gave birth to three children, but only one survived.”

Linda Salem also talked about the legacy of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: “One of the most discussed motifs of the novel is Otherness.” The novel has been referred to in countless essays about race, gender, and class. It has also been nested in the center of discussions about identity formation. This would explain the impressive number of children’s and young adult texts that reimagine the story in order to encourage empathy for Frankenstein-like characters who fall into the category of the Other. Go to Sleep, Little Creep written by David Quinn and illustrated by Ashley Spires plays around with language as the reader helps to say goodnight to little monsters above and below water. The cover features a Madam Frankenstein chasing a baby Frankenstein in a pajama singlet. The simplistic rhymes offer up snippets of moral ideas mixed in with familiar family rituals associated with bedtime fun. A Valentine for Frankenstein written by Leslie Kimmelman and illustrated by Timothy Banks, reimagines Frankenstein as a young monster that other little monsters make fun of. While we can relate to wanting to fit in, “. . . Frankenstein was comfortable in his own green skin.” Lynn Fulton’s She Made a Monster: How Mary Shelley Created Frankenstein, illustrated by Felicita Sala, tells the story of how Mary Shelley came to create her timeless classic: “Mary thought back through her life to the eerie things she had seen in her childhood and the losses she had suffered, particularly her mother, who was the type of writer Mary aspired to be.” The significance of the motifs in Mary Shelley’s works shows in the variety of ways in which the stories are reimagined and in the discussions about her life and work. Her own isolation and alienation as a source of inspiration for this timeless piece solidified her credibility for readers familiar with social rejection for a plethora of audiences.

Released around the 200^th anniversary of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is Kiersten White’s The Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein. According to the Kirkus Review, “White’s (Bright We Burn, 2018, etc.) timely retelling of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is told from the point of view of 17-year-old Elizabeth Lavenza, ward of the Frankensteins and caretaker of Victor Frankenstein.” At the novel’s core is a familiar monster/human binary familiar to Shelley’s own life.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s work lives 200 years after its birth for the same reasons that it was created: Otherness, alienation, and isolation. According to Mary Galbraith, “Mary Shelley called Frankenstein her “hideous progeny” and Shelley herself is both woman and child which is ironic.” She went on to say, “The book and the movie, mostly the book, are prophetic; [Mary Shelley] is the only person who could have written the book.”

~Kiedra Taylor
 English Graduate student with a focus in Children's Literature