Emancipation Books Will Not Change the Fact That Young Girls Dream of Prince Charming
Justyna Grochal: When browsing alternative reading lists for girls, I found a whole range of heroines portrayed very differently than they used to be.
Professor Bogumiła Kaniewska: Literature changes, as does everything in the world and the very world we live in, but it would be unfair to say that classic girls’ literature has always perpetuated the traditional division of roles between men and women.
In books for girls we can meet a lot of rebellious heroines, still very much loved by children today. Pippi Longstocking for instance is a true anarchist, a heroine who does not conform to any conventions and crosses all boundaries. Sometimes even to the point of grotesque, because as you may remember, she’s so strong that she can lift a horse. Plus she’s rich, independent and doesn’t bother to be a good girl. In “The Six Bullerby Children” by Astrid Lindgren, the kids are indeed divided into two camps – the girls and the boys – but there is no difference in the way they are brought up or in their activities: they bake gingerbread biscuits together and hunt crayfish together. “Alice in Wonderland” features a seven-year-old who, out of childlike curiosity, is ready to hop down a rabbit hole to find herself somewhere on the other side of the world. Little My from the “Moomins” is, in turn, a huge malcontent. There are many more such examples, although it is true that these models were not common in literature. Polite girls had the advantage, especially the good and forgiving ones.
Today, this tendency is changing – books offer models of girls or women perfectly coping with various roles, including those traditionally not intended for them. Here I mean the literary career of Maria Skłodowska-Curie for instance, but also literature that shows girls who had to struggle with war or the experience of the Holocaust. There’s a whole range of topics in children’s literature that has emerged from the taboo sphere.
Authors of books for girls often use real life stories, showing that in the history of the country or the world there were valuable, brave and wise women who were successful in various fields. Is literature seeking to fill a gap in the historical narrative?
Definitely. It’s also a response to social demand, because the problem of undervaluing women in history does not just concern literature. Not so long ago, the number of women who have their own statues in the city was counted. It turned out to be one and it was on school grounds. Similar disproportions occur in street names – only 10 percent of Poznań’s streets have female patrons. As a society, we have only recently grown up – and not all of us have – to this awareness that the suffragettes fought for over a century ago. This awareness is also reflected in the way we raise both boys and girls. Books for girls are therefore part of a great process of change.
So it’s about breaking stereotypes? Is this the focus of new literature for girls?
I’d say that’s part of it. Apart from the attempts at breaking stereotypes – at which the so-called anti-pedagogical trend excels, abandoning intrusive didactics – we have a whole slew of texts of a therapeutic character, I would say, which allow children and teenagers – not just girls – to confront various real-life problems, such as divorce, addictions, unwanted pregnancy or sexual harassment. These kinds of themes also appear in children’s literature, and I was thinking about them too when I mentioned literature moving out of the realm of the taboo. We no longer shy away from socially difficult topics: for example, in the book “Which one is Malala?” Renata Piątkowska confronts the issue of terrorism. The sphere of the taboo is therefore diminished. As recently as in the 1970s or 1980s, it was extremely rare for children’s texts to talk about sexual life, sexuality, or the identity of others – minorities, people with disabilities, or those of a different psychosexual orientation or skin colour. These days, literature deals with these problems – even children’s literature.
More and more books for girls are also tackling the subject of body-positivity. Is it also a response to contemporary challenges?
Yes and no. Books vary and they depict different patterns, just like films or TV shows. But this pattern that popular culture proposes – of an eternally-young and beautiful woman who wakes up in the morning in full make-up – definitely needs to be discredited. There is therefore a need to teach children – both girls and boys – tolerance of the other, but also acceptance of oneself in every aspect of existence. This is very important in the case of children, and especially important with girls, precisely because of cultural patterns that can do a lot of damage. Among young girls, the problem of self-acceptance is extremely serious.
A common message in books for girls is the maxim that wisdom is more important than beauty.
Which doesn’t change the fact that little girls want to be princesses, and when they grow up – models or singers. They’ve always wanted to – and I don’t see anything wrong with that: it was my dream, my sister’s dream, my daughter’s dream. At the same time, I think the more important message in worthwhile books is that gender doesn’t determine our accomplishments, which means we can pursue our dreams in a variety of shapes and forms. A girl has the right to dream of being an astronaut, but she also has the right to dream of a career as a model. One dream is no worse than the other. Because every dream is beautiful.
And at the same time, if she dreams of being a princess, those princesses are presented very differently today. We see this in changing literature and fairy tales – the princess does great on her own, she doesn’t need Prince Charming to come and rescue her.
Yes, it’s a strongly emancipatory trend. But this still does not change the fact that in young girls and women the dream of Prince Charming who will come and take them to the world of their dreams will always be very strong. The point is that this shouldn’t be the only accepted pattern or the only desired one. So that we might have the opportunity to confront different dreams or attitudes towards the world. So that literature, too, can respect this diversity of dreams. It’s important that we don’t skew it the other way.
A story like “Anne of Green Gables”, for instance, meets all the requirements of a classic novel for girls, and somewhere in there it is also lined with the story of Cinderella, that is, a poor orphan girl whose life changes under the influence of love – first parental replacement, and then reciprocated love for a man. This is, after all, a book that is still hugely popular and still meets the needs of young girls. Another thing is that Anne is also a bit of a rebel, which does not prevent her from fulfilling typical girlish dreams.
Do you like the direction in which literature for girls is heading?
Yes. I also like that it doesn’t shy away from problems and changes with the times. There is nothing worse than literature that does not correspond to the world in which it exists. I used to work as a teacher. We read Prus’s “Antek” with the children and there was an extremely dramatic scene in which Rozalka is being shoved in a bread oven. The children began to laugh after reading this passage because to them the description was so absurd and unbelievable that they totally failed to accept it and actually completely rejected the realism of the scene. So if we feed children this kind of literature, that’s the shortest way for them to just reject books altogether.
Is that why we should modernise the reading canon?
Yes, especially in primary school. I’ve always held the belief – not a very popular one among Polish language teachers – that at the primary school level the most important thing is to teach children to read and to be interested in books. So texts should be interesting to them and relatable. It’s not the children’s fault, it’s a mechanism that we as adults have within us too. We like to read what we care about. If we come across a book that doesn’t interest us and doesn’t get through to us, we set it aside as boring. It’s the same with children. Children should read books that are close to them in a variety of ways – that suit their aesthetics, that entertain them or that provide answers to their important questions.
If a particular set book is just a stage in the development of certain literary skills, I don’t bode well for its success. It’ll just remain a rejected book. Hence our reluctance to return to set books. And sometimes when we reread them as adults, we discover that they’re actually pretty good books.
Speaking of set books. In the popular Netflix series “Ginny & Georgia”, the teenage protagonist points out to her teacher that only two books on the reading list were written by women. This prompted me to take a look at the reading lists in Polish schools and outside of grades I-III these statistics are similarly discriminatory.
If we look at children’s literature, especially for younger children, there is a preponderance of female authors. Ladies were very keen on children’s literature and it’s still the case that there are a lot of women among the authors of literature for children and so-called young adults. The predominance of male authors in subsequent grades, on the other hand, results from the structure of the canon, in which so-called classic texts predominate. Not only do we have mostly men here, but we have men who lived much earlier than modern children. A relatively small proportion of these texts are aimed at young readers. These set books, especially beginning in fourth grade, often include books designed for adult readers. Prus’s “Short Stories” or Mickiewicz’s “Pan Tadeusz” are intended for a more mature audience. If the canon includes texts from the past, it is not surprising that there are few texts by women. But this is clearly not a correct situation and definitely not one that should continue. There are supplementary set books such as “Anne of Green Gables” and “Alice in Wonderland”, but generally school reading lists are based on classic volumes. And the classical nature of didactic set books is synonymous with male authors.
Justyna Grochal talks to Professor Bogumiła Kaniewska
Professor Bogumiła Kaniewska, literary scholar, Polish philologist and rector of the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan
The text was published at wysokieobcasy.pl on 20 March 2021
